ABSTRACT
At first sight, accounting and sustainability might be thought to have little connection. However, sustainability is one of the major challenges facing society; and accounting is a major component of modern organizational and social management (Burchell et al, 1980). What is accounted for influences views of what is important and helps to determine the terms in which issues are debated; and what accountants fail to identify and measure can easily be omitted from policy discussions and decisions at many different levels. Unfortunately, environmental sustainability is something that does not fit easily into conventional approaches to accounting, not least because accountants tend to base their figures on economic transactions entered into by the entity being accounted for, and thus are prone to ignore what economists refer to as ‘externalities’ – including harmful environmental consequences. Stated in this way, there would appear to be scope for exploring the relationship between accounting and sustainability; but it begins to look like a somewhat negative exercise, with accounting being part of ‘the problem’ of unsustainable development.
