ABSTRACT
If a company is to manage its sustainability contribution, including its social impact, it must measure and account for it. Therefore, a coherent system of accounting needs to be developed for the ecological and social dimensions of sustainability. Some work has been undertaken to do this in relation to income accounting (Bent, 2005), but very little on true capital accounting. One particular difficulty with such a sustainability capital accounting is that, unlike the global level at which capital is an asset, at the level of the individual company, capital is a liability which is owned and therefore (in the logic of the market) priced by another party – which is the immediate motive to account for it. Of course, only very recently have mechanisms been introduced to price carbon emissions; the great majority of ecological factors involved in sustainability remain almost wholly un-priced. The pricing of social factors is perhaps even more problematic, as it would seem to require the commercialization of a whole range of human experience which has hitherto been largely outside the marketplace. The pricing of some forms of intellectual property, to take just one example, is still a very controversial issue.
