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Call for papers
Accounting for sustainability is a fast evolving landscape. It has moved in multiple directions and over many dimensions. A first dimension is a shift from measuring flows and assessing their impact to evaluating how an entity contributes to the maintenance of healthy societies and ecosystems. A second dimension is a shift from voluntary to mandatory reporting, with multiple standard setters moving in to develop consistent but competing frameworks. A third dimension is a shift from reporting for public relation purposes to making commitments and monitoring them. A fourth dimension is a shift from reporting on how enterprise value will be affected by the ecological crisis to understanding how entities contribute to cause, prevent or mitigate this crisis.
Within this field multi-capital accounting has caught the interest of academics, practitioners, and standard setters. It is based on the idea that an entity’s performance is multidimensional and relies on the use of many capitals to prosper. However superficial similarities in the terminology used by different multi-capital accounting models hide different visions of sustainability. Concepts need to be made more explicit.
Our stance is that capitals are not resources a business is entitled to use, own and exploit. Rather they are inputs from nature, society, stakeholders and stockholders to which business is liable, with a responsibility for preserving these entities. Capitals should not be substituted to one another, nor maintained separately, but in relation to one another, in a holistic manner. We should also consider a hierarchy of capitals. Economic activity is nested within human societies and can only thrive if these societies are kept in a good condition. Human societies themselves are nested within ecosystems and cannot exist if natural cycles are not able to maintain life on earth. The conditions which define a viable society and a viable planet should be considered in order to define appropriate metrics. Finally, although financial metrics are not to be ruled out before we understand what they should mean, they cannot replace physical or social metrics.
Considering the interest that has risen from practitioners, academics and organizations alike on multi-capital accounting, we therefore suggest that this special issue could be a collection of innovative, path-breaking papers with rigorous arguments, analyses and concepts on the following subjects:
- What are the different types of multi-capital models and how do they compare to one another?
- How can multi-capital accounting play a role in:
- supporting awareness, unveiling denial, reducing uncertainty, encouraging adequate action, informing decision-makers and guiding implementation
- encouraging and supporting speedy transformative approaches?
- helping to place and maintain humankind in the “safe and just operating space”, above social foundations and below planetary boundaries?
- building regenerative business models which contribute to the maintenance and even to the regeneration of social and natural capitals?
- How do you build/invent new tools, collect and manage data, report to managers and outside parties?
- What type of monetization be considered for multicapital accounting models?
- How can theoretical perspectives from other disciplines, both social sciences and environmental sciences, be a source of inspiration to develop a multi-capital accounting framework?
Topics can include:
- multi-capital accounting as a (management/accounting) innovation
- accounting for planetary boundaries and social foundations
- reflection on the past to present (from full cost to sustainability assessment models, to multi-capital accounts?)
- engagement research on multi-capital account
- comparison of existing multi-capital accounting models
- normative papers on how multi-capital accounts should look like for strong sustainability
- links between CSRD and multi-capital accounting
Submission Deadline:
September 30th 2023
Suggested Literature
Two special issues in Sustainability, Accounting, Management and Policy Journal:
Value, True Value and Value to Whom ?
Exploring capital and the notion of multiple capitals
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