Measuring and managing sustainability. A literature review and research agenda

Over the years sustainability practices have become extremely important for companies as well as for the society. Although most companies have developed sustainability programs, as they are reducing waste, cutting carbon emissions, and otherwise enhancing operational efficiency, we are witnessing a mishmash of sustainability tactics that does not add up to a sustainable strategy. To endure, a sustainable strategy has to cope with the competing – and apparently divergent – interests of all stakeholders: investors, employees, customers, governments, NGOs, and society (Eccles and Serafein, 2013; Epstein et al., 2015). In this context Performance Measurement Systems play a key role as they help companies to formalize and implement their sustainable strategies as well as to proactively identify new trajectories that help companies to appropriately reconcile the trade-offs between different stakeholders’ wants and needs (Franco-Santos et al., 2007; Epstein and Roy, 2001). As a matter of fact, in the last fifteen years, various streams of research within the performance measurement and the management accounting domain, have examined the measurement and management of sustainability from various perspectives. An extensive body of research has examined environmental disclosure and reporting - see Berthelot, Cormier, and Magnan (2003) for a review. Other research has defined the concept of environmental management accounting (e.g., Bartolomeo et al., 2000; Burritt, 2004), other studies have examined the role of accounting/accountants in environmental management (e.g., Wilmshurst and Frost, 2001) and issues related to environmental cost accounting (e.g., Antheaume, 2004; Herbohn, 2005) or eco-control (Henry and Journeault, 2009, 2010). Despite the growing number of studies that have discussed these issues, a consistent framework that explores and details this growing body of research is yet to be identified. For this reason the purpose of this paper is to develop a systematic literature review of the practices and methods that managers can adopt to plan and execute a proper measurement and management of sustainability. Specifically, this paper aims to analyse the literature on sustainability measurement and management, to identify its subfields, and to suggest avenues for future research on this topic.