Jan Bebbington

• Professor at University College Birmingham

Purpose The study investigates how sustainability reporting constructs a narrative about an organization that provides its members with a reality they can accept, with the consequence of producing organizational stability. Design/methodology/approach The article reports a research engagement concerning the “backstage” of sustainability reporting i...

Transnational companies have substantive impacts on nature: a hallmark of living in the Anthropocene. Understanding these impacts through company provision of information is a precursor to holding them accountable for nature outcomes. The effect of increasing disclosures (of varying quality) is predicated on ‘information governance’, an approach th...

Corporate reporting must embrace holistic, scientific principles.

The blue economy is being promoted as capable of achieving sustainability and prosperity, fair use of the ocean and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ensuring a more equitable distribution of goods and services provided by the ocean represents a major challenge. There is overwhelming evidence that current access to ocean benefits and res...

The ocean is important for everyone—it produces oxygen and food, stores carbon and heat, offers space for economic activities and recreation, and continues to inspire and support culture and well-being. Globally, the value of key ocean assets has been estimated at US$24 trillion and the value of derived services at between $1.5 trillion and $6 tril...

Corporations are perceived as increasingly powerful and critically important to ensuring that irreversible climatological or ecological tipping points on Earth are not crossed. Environmental impacts of corporate activities include pollution of soils, freshwater and the ocean, depletion of ecosystems and species, unsustainable use of resources, chan...

Stewardship is a concept that has historically underpinned the practice of accounting, with a focus on the stewardship of financial resources. As times change, so too do the elements of organisational performance that might be subject to stewardship demands. Critically for this paper, a roadmap for organisational stewardship in the Anthropocene is...

https://wevaluenature.eu/article/guarding-against-perverse-outcomes-natural-capital-thinking

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the contribution of the Mike Power’s Audit Society and associated papers from the 1990s to the (then) emerging field of environmental accounting. The paper also looks forward to how these seminal ideas are influenced by accounting in the Anthropocene, as examined in more recent sustainability acc...

Labor abuse on fishing vessels and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing violate human rights, jeopardize food security, and deprive governments of revenues. We applied a multi-method approach, combining new empirical data with satellite information on fishing activities and vessel characteristics to map risks of labor abuse and IUU fis...

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world’s largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process ai...

It is a fundamental problem that, even if humanity can collectively agree that Earth’s biodiversity must be conserved, it is very difficult to translate this into effective action at the level of governments, organisations and individuals. In this chapter, we review the emerging stream of research in accounting for biodiversity, exploring possible...

Humanity has never benefited more from the ocean as a source of food, livelihoods, and well-being, yet on a global scale this has been accompanied by trajectories of degradation and persistent inequity. Awareness of this has spurred policymakers to develop an expanding network of ocean governance instruments, catalyzed civil society pressure on the...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to provide an account of the period prior to the creation of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI): a body that was critical to the institutionalization of sustainability reporting (SR). By examining this “pre-history,” we bring to light the actors, activities and ways of thinking that made SR more likely to be inst...

There is substantial and unexplored potential for scientists to engage with the private sector for a sustainable ocean. The importance of such cooperation is a frequent emphasis of international dialogues and statements, it is embedded within the Sustainable Development Goals, and has been championed by prominent business leaders and scientists. Bu...

The ocean is important for everyone—it produces oxygen and food, stores carbon and heat, offers space for economic activities and recreation, and continues to inspire and support culture and well-being. Globally, the value of key ocean assets has been estimated at US$24 trillion and the value of derived services at between $1.5 trillion and $6 tril...

This paper examines the distribution of the goods and services provided by the ocean, existing inequities and the resulting impacts on the environment, human health, and income distribution now and in the future. The paper outlines the tensions and trade-offs, and presents recommendations for addressing some of the underlying and systemic features...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the nature and relevance of debates around the existence of, and ramifications arising from, the Anthropocene for accounting scholarship. Design/methodology/approach The paper’s aim is achieved through an in-depth analysis of the Anthropocene, paying attention to cross-disciplinary contributions,...

Externalities comprise economic, social and/or environmental impacts arising from the activities of an entity that are borne by others, at least in the short term. As they do not feedback directly into immediate financial consequences for the entity, they tend to be outside the remit of financial reporting. A dispersed academic accounting literatur...

Purpose This paper aims to establish and advance the role of academic accounting in the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which are regarded as the most salient point of departure for understanding and achieving environmental and human development ambitions up to (and no doubt beyond) the year 2030. Design/methodology/a...

This chapter provides a description of, and reflection upon, the creation and life of the St Andrews Sustainability Institute as a way of exploring the potential for institutions of higher education to foster sustainable development. The Institute was established in 2007 and has been led by the author of this chapter in partnership with a wider gro...

This paper emerges from an invitation to reflect upon the achievements of social and environmental accounting as well as to identify the challenges that lie ahead as the field continues its engagement with the goal of sustainable development. Three perspectives are developed in pursuit of that aim, namely: exploring the nature of the issues and mod...

The primary responsibility for global climate change responsiveness is usually attributed to nation states. This is reflected in the United Nations’ processes aimed at enrolling governments in mitigation and adaptation programmes. Such an approach begs the question of how global climate change (GCC) responsiveness might proceed if a national govern...

The objective of this paper is to explore the nature of disclosure on climate change in annual and standalone reports of organisations who took part in the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS). This article uses content analysis to codify disclosure in order to compare disclosure in different media as well as the possible effect that membership in...

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=17106310&ini=aob This paper develops the contributions that higher education institutions (HEIs) can make to sustainable development and explores issues and drivers for creating accounts for “university social responsibility”. It aims to contribute to discussions about whether, under which circum...

In this paper we explore how carbon markets have entered the world of financial accounting. The advent of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in 2005 provided the opportunity for global climate change concerns to be translated from policy into something that could, and should, be recognised within financial accounting. That is, the...

Actor-network theory (ANT) has been increasingly utilised within the accounting and management literature (Justesen and Mouritsen, 2011) and is argued to be useful because it includes both the human and the non-human in its analytical frame. ANT bypasses a nature/society dualism and, as such, it may help to develop organisational theories that can...

Sustainable development policy is explored through the national sustainable development strategies of two countries, Scotland and New Zealand, over the period 2003–2007. Since governance of issues starts with formulation of strategic direction, texts that purport to address sustainable development strategy provide a lens into governments' value sys...

Over the past 20 years scholars have argued that key to achieving sustainability are the paradigms of organisational leaders, with these needing to move away from anthropocentric toward sustaincentric and or ecocentric perspectives. This paper reports on an empirical study that explored the views of leaders of a series of environmentally focused or...

This paper contributes to understandings of the production of normativity, i.e. the ways in which actors come to see rules as binding, in the context of corporate reporting regimes. Although the accounting literature recognises that a range of actors participate in the regulatory process, it continues to embrace dichotomous explanations of regulato...

This paper seeks to introduce LETS and to suggest that they raise a number of significant questions for accounting and finance. This introduction is set within the context of society's pursuit of sustainable development, with LETS being one way in which marginalised communities may take back control over their economic circumstances. Briefly, LETS...

This collection of papers, The Major Works in Social and Environmental Accounting, seeks to reflect a growing but often contentious area of research, teaching and practice. The very nature of the subject area raises a range of difficult questions that demand our attention. Such questions include: What is social accounting 1 ? Is it important? How c...

This chapter provides an economic perspective of forestry and climate change in the UK. A growing body of literature has developed on this subject, particularly in Europe and overseas.

The report 'Combating Climate Change - a role for UK forests' was published in November 2009. It forms part of the response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report published in 2007. The assessment aims to provide a better understanding of how UK forestry can adapt to and improve its contribution to mitigation...

Urban man-made assets have impacts not just on those who develop, build and operate them, but on people who may be quite remote from them. For example, the impact of a building on greenhouse gas emissions arising from fossil fuel use, pollution caused by travel to work patterns and employment opportunities provided by urban developments may be far...

As the social and environmental impacts of human activity have become more evident, the role of sustainable development as an organising principle in a variety of policy contexts and over multiple scales has become central. There are, at least, two implications that emerge from this observation. First, morally infused problems that need to be addre...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to document organizations' self descriptions of why they initiated sustainable development (SD) reporting and explore these explanations using an institutional theory framework. Design/methodology/approach Constructs organizational narratives from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with reporting champions who...

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the debate within the accounting literature as to the likely efficacy of environmental accounting. For purposes of exposition, one can simplify and point to two contrasting positions in the literature. The first suggests that organizations can and do change in substantive ways when they respond to the envir...

The impetus for this special debating forum arises from the concern about the impact of anthropogenic induced global climate change (GCC) and the assumption that GCC raises issues of significance with respect to the accountability of firms to stakeholders for financial and non-financial performance. Governments and supra-national bodies have sought...

One of the principal challenges facing urban sustainability decision makers is the difficulty of measuring costs and values which are expressed in different units and the difficulty of comparing the social benefits of a more expensive housing scheme for example that provides an environment which leads to improved health and wellbeing with a cheaper...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to respond to commentaries on Bebbington, Larrinaga‐Gonzales and Moneva, by Unerman and by Adams, published in Accounting Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 21 No. 3. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews and discusses the points suggested/contested by the commentary papers. Findings – That given...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the proposition that corporate social responsibility reporting could be viewed as both an outcome of, and part of reputation risk management processes. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws heavily on management research. In addition, an image restoration framework is introduced. Findings The...

Integration of environmental, social and economic issues is still a key challenge for the delivery of sustainable development and accordingly sustainability assessment. In attempting to address this challenge in relation to the built environment, SUE-MoT (a consortium of academic, public and private partners) has been formed with a particular focus...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to discussions about engagement in social and environmental accounting, drawing on dialogic theory and philosophy. A dialogic approach, building on existing critical inquiries, is introduced to derive principles to inform “on the ground” engagements. Applying dialogic thinking to social and environ...

The authors examine the extent to which the practices of social and environmental accounting, auditing, and reporting (SEAAR) provide opportunities for the identification, communication, and management of social and environmental risks. In introducing and exploring accounting practices, the theoretical allegiances of accounting are also outlined in...

The authors sketch a framework within which the contributions to this theme issue can be understood. In particular, they discuss various frames of reference or ways of thinking that can be brought to bear on the challenges that arise in evaluating attempts to govern environmental risks. The discussion is divided into three sections. First, they dis...

Within ecological economics there is recognition of the need for new approaches to decision-making to support sustainable development initiatives. There is an increasing acknowledgement of the limitations of cost–benefit analysis approaches as a measure of the (un)sustainability of organizational activities. These are viewed as particularly inappro...

The social responsibility debates of the last thirty years have resolved little and have had only peripheral effects on traditional business behaviour. Social responsibility issues are re-emerging in the light of the environmental crisis and are far too important to be once again marginalised by traditional business thinking. Economic and environme...

Purpose The purpose of this research is to seek to understand and explain the non‐governmental organisation (NGO) and its location in civil society in order to provide a basis for future research work. The paper aims to explore and develop understandings of accountability specifically in the context of the NGO and then extend these insights to the...

There has been from time to time [see, for example, Adv. Public Interest Acc. 2 (1988) 71; Acc. Org. Society 16 (1991) 333; Acc. Educ. 3 (1994) 51; Acc. Aud. Accountability J. 8 (1995) 97; Crit. Perspect. Acc. 10 (1999) 833; Crit. Perspect. Acc. 12 (2001) 471] concern expressed about the state of accounting education and its potential link to the b...

Business has a fundamental role to play in delivering Sustainable Development - the process needed to achieve a sustainable society. Sustainable Development is becoming increasingly recognised as a critical issue for the oil and gas industry to address, and act upon. This paper outlines a practical tool (The Sustainability Assessment Model - SAM) w...

Business has a fundamental role to play in delivering Sustainable Development – the process needed to achieve a sustainable society. Sustainable Development is becoming an important issue for the oil and gas industry to address. There is, however, a lack of tools for improving decision making in this area. The paper outlines a tool (the Sustainabil...

This paper argues that the provision of accounts of and by organisations can be viewed as being a process of education and is thus amenable to a pedagogic assessment. In providing accounts about their activities, organisations are educating those internal and external to their organisation about ‘events’ which have previously been unknown or incomp...

The concept of sustainable development (SD) has a pre-eminent place in the environmental policy agenda where it is defined as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromizing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (United Nations World Conference Environment and Development, 1987, p. 8). Within the accounti...

This paper has been written in response to the perception that ‘sustainable development’ (hereafter SD) and its derivatives are being used in, amongst others, the accounting literature in a way which equates SD development with ‘good environmental management’. Further, the paper assumes that such usage of SD arises, at least in part, from a lack of...