This conceptual paper examines how organisations can operationalise long-term value creation under ecological constraints. While sustainability frameworks have broadened value creation beyond shareholder interests, they often assume that economic, social, and ecological value can be balanced or optimised simultaneously. From an ecological economics perspective, this is problematic, as economic activity is constrained by ecological systems. Building on ecological economics, the paper develops a hierarchical understanding of value creation in which ecological value constitutes a necessary condition for social and economic value. Accordingly, stakeholder-oriented value creation and sustainability performance are reconceptualised as condition-bound rather than additive processes. The paper introduces Integral Sustainability Performance (ISP) as a conceptual construct that embeds ecological constraints across organisational layers of values, culture, strategy, governance, and business models. ISP links macro-level ecological constraints to organisational processes and provides a basis for operationalizing sustainability performance within ecological limits.
This study examines how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks can be aligned with green accounting principles in order to incorporate natural capital valuation into sustainability reporting. Although ESG has become a dominant mechanism for non-financial disclosure, its environmental dimension remains largely centered on standardized indicators, risk exposure, and firm-level performance. This limits its ability to capture the broader value, depletion, and long-term dynamics of natural capital. In contrast, green accounting provides a stronger basis for recognizing environmental stocks, ecosystem services, and ecological degradation, yet it remains insufficiently integrated into mainstream reporting systems. Using a qualitative and conceptual research approach based on structured literature analysis, this study identifies the main points of disconnect between the two approaches and explores their potential convergence. The findings suggest that a more coherent integration of ESG and green accounting is necessary to strengthen the analytical depth, ecological relevance, and strategic value of sustainability reporting.
Erasmia Angelaki, Stavros Garefalakis, Ioannis Samaras et al.· Sustainability Research in t...· 0 citations
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.
Massimo Contrafatto, I. Thomson, Helen Tregidga et al.· Accounting, Auditing & A...· 0 citations
Economic development has generated major gains in productivity, technological capability and material prosperity, while also intensifying ecological pressures, unequal value distribution and the separation of financial performance from social contribution. This conceptual article develops the Meaningful Economy as an integrative framework for redirecting economic activity towards human flourishing, ecological viability and value for stakeholders. It uses a problem-oriented integrative synthesis spanning ecological and institutional economics, the capability approach, the sociology of work, stakeholder theory, humanistic management, financialisation, corporate governance and social accounting. The analysis identifies seven institutional transitions: from indefinite growth to sufficient well-being; from the exploitation of nature to ecological balance; from means to human ends; from financial profit to value for stakeholders; from short-termism to legacy; from meritocracy to inclusive capacity; and from one-dimensional maximisation to balanced governance. Three cross-cutting mechanisms—people-centred work and technology, socially embedded finance and stakeholderoriented social accounting—connect these principles to organisational practice. The framework’s central contribution is a principle of systemic viability grounded in satisficing: institutions should maintain several essential economic, social and ecological conditions rather than maximise a single metric at the expense of the system that sustains it. The Meaningful Economy therefore does not reject markets, firms, technology, finance or profitability; it repositions them as instruments whose legitimacy depends on the quality, distribution and durability of the value they create.
J. Retolaza, Leire San-Jose· Advances in Social Sciences...· 0 citations
Due to the stricter resource and environmental limitations, it is crucial for enterprises to undertake effective ecological environmental protection duties at the same time as seeking economic benefits. This topic has become an important issue in the study of sustainable business. By applying the theories of natural capital, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and green innovation strategy as the theoretical basis, this paper comprehensively reviews the research achievements in the field of corporate environmental responsibility and constructs a three-dimensional integrated analytical framework of "motivation-capability-context". The results are as follows: (1) The theory of natural capital modifies the traditional idea that ecological environment is an external factor of economic development, offering a scientific basis for corporate environmental strategies; (2) There is a significant positive interactive effect between ESG performance and green technological innovation, where R&D investment and information disclosure play a key role as the transmission channels; (3) The interaction between regulatory pressures, stakeholder's expectations from the market and internal corporate abilities jointly influences the environmental responsibility behaviour and decisions of enterprises. According to the above analytical framework, some policy suggestions such as improving environmental information disclosure regulations, strengthening green financial incentive systems and promoting the cooperative management of green supply chains have been put forward. These proposals provide theoretical basis and practical references for helping enterprises to achieve their green transformation.
Hao Chen, Zhuangzhuang Yin· Scientific Journal Of Humani...· 0 citations
Corporate sustainability has traditionally been evaluated through environmental, social, and economic dimensions. However, increasing sustainability challenges, stakeholder expectations, and regulatory requirements indicate that sustainability extends beyond conventional performance measures and requires an integrated perspective that considers both internal organizational capabilities and external institutional conditions. This study develops an integrated internal–external sustainability framework and prioritizes sustainability dimensions from the perspective of licensed sustainability auditors in Türkiye. The proposed framework comprises governance, ethical, behavioral, cultural, environmental, social, economic, legal, and technological dimensions. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to pairwise comparison data collected from 15 licensed sustainability auditors to determine the relative importance of these dimensions. The results indicate that external sustainability dimensions received substantially higher priority (70.97%) than internal dimensions (29.03%), demonstrating that sustainability assessments are primarily shaped by environmental challenges, regulatory requirements, stakeholder expectations, technological developments, and market conditions. Among the nine corporate sustainability dimensions, environmental sustainability received the highest overall priority, followed by technological, ethical, social, economic, legal, governance, cultural, and behavioral dimensions. These findings suggest that although internal organizational capabilities remain important, corporate sustainability is predominantly influenced by external institutional and environmental factors. By proposing an integrated internal–external sustainability framework, this study extends conventional sustainability assessment approaches and contributes to the sustainability governance and assurance literature. The findings also provide practical implications for sustainability reporting, assurance, governance, and strategic decision-making by identifying the sustainability dimensions that deserve the greatest managerial and regulatory attention.
Managing ecosystems effectively requires managing the ways in which people interact with them, as opposed to managing ecosystems in isolation. However, management decisions often rely predominantly on biophysical data, leaving socio-economic data on the periphery. The absence of centralised socio-economic data collected systematically and purposefully makes their inclusion in decision-making challenging and often impractical. Drawing on the aggregation of a variety of data from heterogeneous stakeholders, we present and test the Ecosystem Service Value Chain (ESVC), a decision-oriented data structuring framework for visualising, organising, and prioritising socio-economic data for ecosystem management decision-making. The ESVC represents the stages and processes involved in delivering ecosystem services, from ecosystems to beneficiaries (government, industries, households, and First Nations Peoples). It reframes ecosystems as traceable value flows, linking ecosystem condition to service use, realised benefits and, where possible, valuation across distinct beneficiary groups. We demonstrate that this data structuring framework enhances transparency around data quality and gaps, providing a practical pathway for prioritising socio-economic information in management.
A. Coggan, Jeremy De Valck, Diane Jarvis et al.· Ambio· 1 citation
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
