Integrating Strategic Management Accounting And Sustainability Accounting Under the Twin Transition: A Conceptual Framework For Vietnamese Enterprises Toward Net-Zero Emissions

Abstract

The global pursuit of net-zero emissions has repositioned decarbonisation from a peripheral compliance concern to a determinant of competitive survival, yet the accounting systems firms rely upon to guide strategic decisions were not designed to internalise carbon and other sustainability imperatives. This deficiency is acute in export-dependent, carbon-intensive emerging economies such as Vietnam, which has pledged net-zero emissions by 2050 while facing immediate pressure from the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. This paper addresses a persistent theoretical gap: strategic management accounting and sustainability accounting have developed as largely separate scholarly conversations, leaving unexamined the mechanisms by which the two systems might complement one another under the conditions of the contemporary twin transition. Adopting a desk-research methodology grounded in the synthesis, analysis, comparison, and evaluation of academic, standard-setting, and policy literature, the study develops an integrated conceptual framework built on three interdependent pillars-strategic, sustainability, and digital enablement-drawing on stakeholder theory, institutional theory, the resource-based view, and contingency theory. The framework positions the digital technologies of the twin transition as the mechanism that renders sustainability information strategically actionable and strategic decisions environmentally informed, and it yields three research propositions calibrated to the Vietnamese context. The paper contributes theoretically by bridging two disconnected research streams, and practically by offering managers and policymakers a structured logic for embedding decarbonisation within strategic decision-making. Its principal limitation is that the framework is a theoretical proposition awaiting empirical validation, a task the study specifies as a clear agenda for future research.