Stages of engaging with corporate sustainability accounting

As an approach to the systematic generation and use of sustainability information, sustainability accounting has the objective of delivering an exhaustive basis for sustainability-related decision-making and performance control. Engaging with sustainability accounting to tackle company-specific issues, companies may face similar challenges.
This paper analyses the progress of adoption of corporate sustainability accounting and narrates the experience collected in 16 UK and German companies. Categorising the progress of each company’s sustainability accounting practice in a set of five stages allows to depict this progress. Furthermore, each of these five stages has distinct challenges that need to be dealt with. Examples of these challenges in the researched companies and approaches to tackling them are also presented.
By outlining the path and specific challenges at each stage, the paper contributes towards accelerating sustainability accounting practice. Last but not least, by focusing on the experience of sustainability pioneers, the paper identifies future challenges for late adopters – an important prerequisite for a broader adoption of sustainability accounting throughout economy.