This chapter contributes to the knowledge and understanding of recent trends in social and environmental accounting with the Sustainable Development Goal of the UN Agenda 2030. This study has two specific objectives: 1) to analyse the scientific production that crosses the area of SEA with SDG achievement, quantifying the articles published by year and by title of origin, by citation and research network by author, and by journal impact and 2) to identify publications by author, affiliation, and country and by type, subject, and funder. It is important to understand how sustainability accounting research might contribute to responsible business management towards SDG. A bibliometric analysis of articles published in journals in the Scopus database was carried out in the period between 2016 and 2021. The results of this study describe the current state of research in SEA and SDG achievement and provide a framework that can guide researchers.
TopIntroduction
Social, environmental and economic challenges are increasingly important and are on the global agenda because they affect plans to achieve sustainable development goals (SDG). The release of the 2030 Agenda by the United Nations in 2015 highlighted the relevance of these challenges and highlighted the role that all actors, governments, companies, and citizens have in the pursuit of the 17 SDG. Academic research has been following these issues and the growing scientific production of articles, studies, and reports are remarkable. Researchers in the area of accounting has also developed research in the field of social and environmental accounting and reporting, both from an internal and external perspective. Alongside this research, there has been, more timidly, some research regarding the involvement and contribution of companies in achieving the SDGs of the United Nations Agenda 2030.
Bebbington and Unerman (2018) highlight the holistic nature of the SDGs and question the tendency for companies to focus on a few SDGs that they believe are closer to their activity. This approach opens the possibility for academics to explore to what extent accounting and reporting can address these complexities and interconnections. Thus, it is hoped that the research tends to contribute to this direction.
This chapter survey the scientific production, published, from 2016 until the 1st half of 2021, in the Scopus database, that crosses the area of social and environmental accounting (SEA) with the SDG of the UN Agenda 2030 achievement. Research in the field of SEA has been growing over the last decades, reaching its peak in 2020, thus, we seek to understand if the SEA research has leveraged the development of research on SDGs.
Research based on the crossing of these two domains leads to very poor results, few references cross the SEA and the SDGs. Given the role of social and environmental accounting and reporting in companies, which is increasingly relevant given the global challenges that the SDGs aim to embrace, it is important to know what is being researched, the conclusions reached, and the contributions to the future development of research.
There are several studies in these areas that use bibliometric analysis (see Teixeira & Ribeiro, 2013, Farrukh et al., 2020, Fusco & Ricci, 2019, Petrushenko et al., 2020, Pizzi et al., 2020, Sweileh, 2020, Meseguer-Sánchez et al., 2021, Raman et al., 2021), but few have crossed these two topics (SEA and SDG)
Transnational companies, and the impact of their activity on the environment, should act as levers for achieving sustainable development. Prioritization and coordination across multiple sectors are necessary to achieve the SDGs (Adshead et al., 2020). Companies are key players in achieving the SDGs of the UN agenda.
Bebbington and Unerman (2020) conclude that accounting academics have not kept up with the relevance that SDGs have assumed globally. The research is scarce, and the pace of publication is slow despite some efforts that have been carried out for example in the call for papers for special issues of some journals in the area. In response to the challenge of their researchers, who seek to motivate accounting researchers to engage and contribute to the realization of the SDGs, we seek in this chapter to contribute by identifying possible avenues for this community engagement.
In particular, we intend to understand the evolution of research in the SDGs intersection with SEA research, in which many scientific fields have seen a large production of papers, which includes the pandemic period.
This study has two specific objectives:
- 1.
Analyse the scientific production that crosses the area of SEA with SDG achievement, quantifying the articles published by year and by the title of origin; by citation and research network by the author; and by journal impact;
- 2.
Identify publications by author, affiliation, and country; by type, subject, and funder.