Sustainable development, corporate social responsibility & accounting Prof. Jan Bebbington Centre...
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Sustainable development, corporate social responsibility &
accounting
Prof. Jan BebbingtonCentre for Social & Environmental Accounting Research
St Andrews Sustainability InstituteVice-Chair (Scotland), Sustainable Development Commission
Where I am going …
• Mixture of:– Ideas from academia– Application of these in applied research settings– With awareness of policy context
• Key concepts– Accounting & accountability– Sustainable development– Governance/governmentality
• Played out via accounting for sustainable development example
We all think we know about accountability …
but do we?
and if it were ‘easy’ why does it seem so hard?
A possible definition
“The duty to provide an account (by no means necessarily a financial account) or reckoning of those actions for which one is
responsible”
Gray, Owen & Adams (1996)
Principal
Agent
Instructions
Actions or forebear from action
AccountsContract
Sanctions
All this takes place within a
social & regulatory
context
Observations & nuance
• Context matters (SD is a context conditioner)
• Nature of contract between parties is key (& dictates account)
• Ability to impose sanctions should contract be breached is essential
• Relative power between parties is of fundamental importance
• Notions of closeness & absence of accounts
• Multiple & nested accountability complicates things
• Accountability is not easy & comfortable
• Accounts are not only financial
• ACCOUNTS imply accountability and vice versa
SD & organisations
• Is this connection possible? Useful?
• Integration of the scale of issues
• What would we need to know if an organisation were sustainable?– Environmentally– Socially– Economically
• CSR vs SD– If SD is not a sensible
notion for an organisation ... then you end up talking about CSR
– Responsibility has to be defined (could be linked to SD) … that is appropriate at a corporate level … and know what is not appropriate at that level
Governing is …
• “any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape our conduct by working through our desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes” (Dean, 1999, p 209).
Governmentality (Dean 1999)
Problematization Identification of an issue to be governed
Regimes of governing or analytics of government
•Visibilities•Knowledge•Techniques & practices•Identities
Utopian ideal Aim for governance and belief that governing is possible by regime of governing
Accounting as a technique & practice
• Full cost accounting– Aims to quantify a ‘fuller’ picture of
organisational impacts– Environmentally and/or socially focused
• Externalities– “when the social or economic activities of one
group of persons have an impact on another group and when that impact is not fully accounted for by the first group”
A monetized model
SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE ECONOMIC
capitals
+ve
-ve
All figures are in monetary units
All figures are in monetary units
The Elements of the SAM
SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCE ECONOMIC
Total turnover or total cost
Resources consumedPollution impacts
Social benefit of jobs
Benefits via taxation
Social benefit of product/service