Accounting and accountability tools and practices for environmental issues: a narrative historical academic debate

Since the early 90’s the pathway of sustainability has affected public and pri-vate organizations’ accountability. Until that time, the accountability issue was largely addressed in providing fair accounts internally, as a result of correct uses of managerial accounting tools and procedure and externally, as a result of a cor-rect use of GAAP for the preparation of financial statements and related disclo-sure. However, the concept of accountability is rapidly changed since the early 90’s as a natural aftermath of the growing relevance of other important issues linked to social and environmental variables and facts (financial troubles in de-veloped countries, growing pollution, big corruption scandals, climate changes etc.). In response, both academics and practitioners strove their efforts to new models, concepts and techniques for addressing the enlarged accountability needs for society. While at the beginning of 90’s main issues were represented by searching which existing tools or models could be proposed for addressing these new accountability needs, the passage of time (and especially with the ad-vent of the 21st century) has revealed the need of new and integrated frameworks determining a sort of accountability process re-engineering. The aim of this chapter is, using a narrative and chronological approach, to retrace this never-ending journey with a focus on selected environmental issues and to point out main contributions provided overtime by the academic debate. To this end, it seems possible to chronologically review the debate dividing the timespan in four main periods: 1. the early debate occurred in 90’s regarding accounting for sustainability and preliminary issues for environmental accounting purposes; 2. the “meta” debate observed in late 90’s and early 2000’s aimed at criticizing and refining models and tools proposed during the early one; 3. the environmental debate, which became the absolute protagonist in the light of many alarms launched throughout the world in the late of 10’s; 4. the recent debate regarding the awareness of an integrated approach and the need of integrated reports. To this regard, we will see that main issues, which historically affect accounting themes, such as harmonization, standardization, compulsoriness, or voluntariness seem to be so far the heart and the solution of the problem. Consequently, this paper is organized in four sections aimed at explor-ing one by one each period individuated and the related debate. Final remarks conclude the paper summing up evidences achieved and formulating sugges-tions for further researches.