Sustainability accounting for interconnectivity: addressing a critical methodological challenge

Abstract

To develop a research method for evaluating accounting for sustainability from the perspective of governing organisational interconnections within dynamic socio-ecological systems. We develop a research method that evaluates differences between the expected and the accounted-for interconnections between an organisation, its activities and the resilience of the socio-ecological systems it is embedded in. This method is designed to identify interconnections that are unaccounted for, inappropriately accounted for and appropriately accounted for. This method can be integrated with established sustainability accounting research methods, providing additional insights from sustainability science and complex adaptive systems by articulating (mis)alignments of organisational accounting with requirements for governing the resilience of socio-ecological systems and sustainable transformation programmes. We apply a three-stage method to a case study to illustrate its feasibility and confirm its potential to provide additional insights in this and other empirical contexts. In this case, the combination of omitted and inappropriately accounted for interconnections was problematically misaligned with the organisation's sustainability strategy. Managers in the organisation reported that this analysis offered a pathway for developing more appropriate accounting to inform their sustainability governance and sector-wide transformation. We contribute to the literature on accounting for sustainability by proposing a method for evaluating accounting for interconnectivity, a critical attribute for sustainable transformation. We illustrate the possibilities created through a resilience-informed method built on a normative framework that incorporates an explicit consideration of the essential accounting attributes of the interconnections between an accounting object, sustainable governance, the consequences of any actions by an accounting object and resilient socio-ecological systems.