ABSTRACT
The 12 social foundations represent fundamental human needs and rights that have been the subject of international agreements. The doughnut work (Raworth, 2017) was based on the UN Millennium Goals, taken up and amended in 2015 in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Raworth, 2017). All the foundations are essential and interdependent; they were thought out at the level of nations and sometimes intersect. A priori, therefore, they would not be directly transposable to corporate business models. This chapter therefore explains the choices made to bring these foundations closer to the corporate context. This part of the LIFTS project was far from without its challenges. The method that emerged is a proposal for what “social accounting” might look like, with a systems approach. At this stage, the method is still experimental, and further research could be useful in strengthening the analyses.
This chapter first reviews the limitations of the approaches used to date for social accounting, and summarises the debates emerging in the literature. Then, based on the general principles of the LIFTS model and the literature review carried out, this chapter proposes a theoretical approach to social accounting, before returning to its transposition into practice.
