دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی دستیابی به اهداف توسعه پایدار سازمان ملل: نقش مهم برای تحقیقات حسابداری - امرالد 2017

Abstract

Purpose: This paper aims to establish and advance the role of academic accounting in the pursuit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which are regarded as the most salient point of departure for understanding and achieving environmental and human development ambitions up to (and no doubt beyond) the year 2030. Design/Methodology/Approach: Synthesis of interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainable development and integration of this with the accounting for sustainability literature. In addition, potential accounting research contributions are proposed so as to support the development of new research avenues. Findings: Existing research in accounting that is relevant to individual Sustainable Development Goals serves as an initial link between them and the accounting discipline. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals focus highlights new sites for empirical work (including interdisciplinary investigations) as well as inviting innovation in accounting theoretical frameworks. Moreover, the Goals provide a context for (re)invigorating accounting’s contribution to sustainable development debates. Originality/value: This is the first paper to explore the roles academic accounting can play in furthering achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals through enhanced understanding, critiquing and advancing of accounting policy, practice and theorizing. It is also the first paper to propose a research agenda in this area.

6 Closing reflections

The UN SDGs represent the ‘state of the art’ thinking of governments around the globe as to the challenges that face the world as well as the mechanisms by which these challenges might start to be addressed. The SDGs require us to act “within our current obsolete development framework to bend environmental and social justice curves as much as possible, while simultaneously fostering the longer-term shift in consciousness to values and institutions that equitably integrate people and planet” (Sterling, 2016: 210 – quoting Rockström, 2015). With this in mind, the purpose of this paper has been to establish and advance the role of academic accounting in pursuit of the SDGs. In pursuing this aim, the paper has proposed three elements of an accounting research community response to the SDGs and their implementation. First, the technologies of accounting, target setting and reporting are required within the UN SDG architecture of ‘metagovernance’ and this represents an opportunity for scholars in evaluating and advancing how accounting is used in these contexts. Second, the SDGs touch upon topic areas that are already researched in some manner within social, environmental and sustainable development accounting scholarship; each of whose parameters and focus may be shaped and transformed by the impetus behind the SDGs. Finally, it has been suggested that there are new avenues for investigation and theorization that are prompted by the SDGs and their connection with ‘more than accounting’ domains of scholarship (including natural science, other social sciences and humanities). While knowing about the SDGs is productive in and of itself, this paper suggests that they provide the opportunity for the accounting for sustainable development academic field to further develop its contributions. The SDGs have already generated engagement across a wide array of actors including, significantly for our purposes, actors engaged with business, accounting and finance. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the SDGs is that they reflect a consensus “that business had a crucial role to play in achieving transformational global development” (Caprani, 2016: 103). Our proposition in this paper is that accounting academics (as a community and in concert with others) can contribute substantively to that challenge.