Question

Bebbington and Unerman (2018) propose that professional and academic (research focused) accounting can advance the pursuit of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Discuss this argument.

Answer 1

Answer:

Research into the roles of accounting in furthering sustainable development has expanded, and become more sophisticated, over the three decades since the concept of sustainable development was proposed by the seminal Brundtland Report (United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (UNWCED), 1987) as being a guiding principle bridging environmental and human development concerns (Bebbington and Larrinaga)

In the most recent iteration of the global sustainable development agenda, the United Nations’ (UN) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2015) adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are intended to “stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet”. These SDGs are increasingly being referred to in policy circles simply as “The Global Goals”. While being intergovernmental commitments, the SDGs have rapidly gained traction and salience among a broad range of actors beyond the 193 UN member states who unanimously endorsed them, such as public policy bodies, NGOs and many public sector and private sector organizations (including many businesses and professional bodies). As evidence later in this paper demonstrates, elements of the accounting profession are among actors who have enthusiastically embraced the SDGs, seeing a pivotal role for accountants and accounting in supporting their realization.

In the academic world, SDG-related research has begun to emerge in several disciplines, including business and management (Annan-Diab and Molinari, 2017; Schaltegger et al., 2017; Storey et al., 2017). Some of this research identifies and develops the energizing effects of committing to an SDG framework in guiding organizational policy and action. However, the SDGs and their potential and saliency have only just started to make an appearance in the accounting literature (see Bebbington et al., 2017). In this paper, we argue that accounting academics can and should play a substantive role in helping embed policy and action at an organizational level in a way that contributes toward achievement of the SDGs. We therefore believe that there is a need to raise awareness of the SDGs among accounting academics to help in the initiation, scoping and development of high-quality research projects in this area. Equally, accounting scholarship has much to bring to the pursuit of the SDGs, a point that will be further developed in the latter sections of this paper.

the SDG framing provides an opportunity and need to revisit, redefine and refine the topics and issues studied by social, environmental and economic sustainability accounting researchers – as well as providing opportunities to re-examine the conceptual underpinnings of these fields. Building on these opportunities and needs both for research into the possible roles accounting can play in furthering organizational-level management and operational contributions to achievement of the SDGs, and for broader interdisciplinary research involving accounting, this section seeks to prompt specific areas of work and provide general encouragement to use the SDGs as a way of reflecting upon accounting research. This is not an exhaustive list of possible avenues, but offers suggestions designed to prompt our collective imagination.

In so doing, it is important for accounting academics to appreciate that much of the information and underlying data that will need to be used within meaningful SDG-related accounting practice will probably come from systems that have so far been beyond the boundaries of entity-level sustainability accounting and reporting. Where such systems have been outside the purview of social and environmental accounting academics, this makes embracing interdisciplinarity even more important in a research agenda seeking to enhance the role of accounting in achievement of the SDGs.