Sustainability Management and Accounting Practices in the Public Sector

Dear Colleagues,

The public sector is composed of several organisations providing services (i.e., education, healthcare, justice, culture) and utilities (transport, water, waste) which are constitutive of the society (Broadbent and Guthrie,1992).

In doing so, the public sector has been assigned a central role to promote sustainability (e.g. Ball and Bebbington, 2008; Birney et al., 2010) and more recently to support the achievement of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Bebbington and Unerman, 2017).

The public sector’s leading role in promoting sustainability could hold mandating, facilitating, partnering, and endorsing activities (The World Bank, 2002; 2018; Siboni and Sangiorgi, 2013). In the mandating role, public sector at different levels defines policy and legislative frameworks to embed sustainability in practices. Acting as facilitator, the public sector can support and stimulate the adoption of the sustainability agenda. Accordingly, the World Public Sector Report 2019 has highlighted the public sector’s primary need to “promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development” (UN, 2019, p. 2). Moreover, the public sector’s strategic partnership role is central in achieving collaboration with civil society and private sectors. The fourth role of the public sector is related to the endorsement of sustainability and related-initiatives.

In recent years the public sector has been involved in a major managerial and organisational change, with a greater tension in promoting a more efficient use of resources (Manes Rossi, 2016) and improving the ability to create public value (Moore, 1995; Benington, 2009).

Parallelly, a growing interest among the society emerged on the public services’ sustainability, to support public trust (Pollit et al., 2017). Consequently, a greater demand for transparency and accountability to whom involved in managing public funds has emerged to communicate about sustainability policies, strategies, actions, results, and impacts.

Research about sustainability accounting has widely investigated practices undertaken by the private sector, despite the public sector’s potential to promote advance in sustainability come first (Sangiorgi et al., 2017). Recent literature has focused on the use of sustainability reporting frameworks and tools (e.g. Biondi and Bracci, 2018; Manes-Rossi et al., 2020) and on the role of public sector in promoting carbon accounting as well as the use of quality of life indicators (Ball et al., 2009, 2017).

However, sustainability management and accounting practices in the public sector are exciting research topics that should be further investigated by scholars considering a large number of unexplored avenues so far.

This Special Issue invites authors to send theoretical and empirical proposals to contribute to a greater understanding of the practices of sustainability management and accounting by the public sector, promoting papers providing experiences coming from different type of public organisations and countries.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, contributions concerning public sector on the follows:
- Literature reviews on sustainability management and accounting

- Form the Burthland Report to date, does the commitments of governments toward sustainability changed? How?

- Relationship between sustainability and SDGs: what is new?

- The role of national and local governments in promoting sustainability: examples of mandating, facilitating, partnering, and endorsing frameworks - Role and practices of public utilities in achieving sustainability

- Role and practices of public utilities in achieving sustainability

- Practices of stakeholders and civil society engagement to promote SDGs

- Case studies of sustainable management

- Sustainability and environmental accounting practices

- Sustainability and climate change planning practices

- Factors enabling and counteracting sustainability commitment inside organisations

- How do sustainability commitment and discourse establishes and develops within organisations?

- Analysis of costs and benefits related to sustainability management practices

- Lesson learned from practices of sustainability management and accounting

- Channels and tools to promote and engage human resources in sustainability initiatives

- How sustainability is represented by the media

- Assessment and visualising tools for sustainability

- Accountability tools for sustainability

- Assurance practices of sustainability accounting and reporting

- Consequences of COVID-19 in sustainability commitments and practices by public sector organisations

- Carbon accounting and reporting theory and practices

References
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Ball, A., Grubnic, S., & Birchall, J. (2017). Sustainability accounting and accountability in the public sector. In Bebbington, J., Unerman, J., and O’Dwyer, B. (Eds), Sustainability Accounting and Accountability (Routledge, London).

Ball, A., Mason, I., Grubnic, S. & Hughes, P. (2009) The Carbon Neutral Public Sector, Public ManagementReview, 11 (5), 575-600.

Bebbington, J. & Unerman, J. (2017), Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: An enabling role for accounting research, Accounting Auditing & Accountability Journal, 31(1), 2-24.

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Biondi, L., Bracci, E. (2018). Sustainability, popular and integrated reporting in the public sector: A fad and fashion perspective. Sustainability, 10 (9), 3112.
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Prof. Maria Teresa Nardo
Prof. Benedetta Siboni
Prof. Lara Tarquinio
Guest Editors

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• public sector
• accounting
• corporate social responsibility and management