Critical Perspectives on Accounting and Sustainability

As the world moves into a new era, characterized by depleted environmental resources coupled with climate change, businesses seem to have reacted accordingly, making sustainability top of their visible agenda. As such, there is a need to enact the necessary changes and monitor them. Accounting has sought to adapt to address the needs of businesses in this new environment and this book’s discourse reflects accounting for sustainability and accounting for climate change.

This book argues that social and environmental accounting has been developing for the last 40 years without ever succeeding in answering the problems and in fact, is actually one of the main problems preventing these issues being satisfactorily addressed. Sustainability cannot be achieved through accounting until the notion of equity is included and accounting adapts from a focus upon efficiency, to a focus upon equity. Games theory can help address this problem but needs developing to be able to do so.

Critical Perspectives on Accounting and Sustainability shows how these problems can be overcome and concludes by making some definite proposals for managing a sustainable future.