Theorising environmental accounting and reporting

Environmental accounting and reporting is a vast field of study embracing a range of research topics and methods. In the past 30 years it has evolved to embrace increasingly sophisticated theorisations of practice. This chapter reviews a selection of these theorisation attempts by exploring seven themes underpinning theorising in this domain. These themes encompass the following: framing the emergence of environmental reporting, theorising the why of environmental reporting, theorising the how of environmental accounting and reporting, theorising the role of environmental accounting in organisational level change, theorising field-level change in environmental reporting, theorising stakeholder engagement around environmental reporting and theorising the role of language in environmental reporting. The chapter highlights how theoretical frames from outside the accounting and management fields, such as sustainability science, are now being mobilised to inform developing work in areas like ecological accounting. It concludes by encouraging scholars to extend and challenge existing theorisations and to draw inspiration from grounded theory methods to offer more original and less derivative theorisations of underlying processes of environmental accounting and reporting.