Exploring Accounting-Sustainability Hybridisation in the UK Public Sector

The transformative potential of accounting-sustainability hybrids has been promoted and problematized in the literature. We contribute to this debate by exploring, theoretically and empirically, the role of accounting in shaping and reshaping sustainability practices. We develop a holistic framework which we use to analyse the governing and mediating roles of accounting-sustainability hybrids in the Environment Agency (of England and Wales) and West Sussex County Council. Our analysis identifies that local accounting-sustainability hybrids contribute positively to improving eco-efficiency, have some impact on eco-effectiveness, but limited bearing on social justice. Emerging assemblages of accounting-sustainability hybrids create capacity for wider sustainability transformations, particularly through their mediating roles. However, a number of factors combine to frustrate further sustainability transformations within these organisations and those they are charged with governing. These factors include the structural constraints of the accounting-sustainability hybrids influenced by a relatively weak local sustainability programmatic and the pressing need to meet increasing service delivery expectations in a period of severe resource constraints. in sustainable transformations within organisations. Our framework helps in analysing the process by which accounting-sustainability hybrids are selected as mediating instruments and the impact this choice has on the shaping and reshaping of local sustainability governance practices. We refine the levels of analysis by prior governmentality studies Miller, to reflect upon the complex nature of organisational changes associated with the emerging sustainability programmatic. Our holistic framework is drawn from a number of sources, including the governmentality and accounting, new public management accounting and accounting-sustainability literatures. Central to this framework is the middle layer or bridge, referred to by Kurunmäki and Miller as the mediating instrument. We develop additional insights into the relations between accounting mediating instruments and the programmatic discourses that give them form as well as local service imperatives that influence their content. In our framework we distinguish between local and non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids, with the former referring to processes and practices generated internally and the latter offered as generic solutions by external bodies. procurement processes, building environmental impacts into capital expenditure analysis, as well as training accounting staff in environmental management. Accounting-sustainability hybridisation in the Environment Agency and West Council involved patterns of complex and reflexive dynamics as suggested by our holistic framework. Accounting-sustainability hybrids were present in the construction of local programmatic discourses and used to mediate between local practices and the sustainability programmatic. The influence of local hybrids at all stages of the sustainability transformation could create a self-referential dynamic with all subsequent hybridisations dominated by accounting characteristics with the risk of decoupling local practices from the sustainability programmatic. Our analysis of the cases demonstrates that this multi-level involvement of accounting-sustainability hybrids was partially responsible for the predominance of accounting-eco-efficient hybrids although without these hybrids it would be less likely that the eco-efficiency improvements in the Environment Agency and West Sussex County Council would have occurred. For example, it was the everyday accounting-sustainability practices, rather than non-local accounting-sustainability hybrids such as the Connected Reporting Framework, that were selected as mediating instruments between the sustainability programmatic and local processes and practices. The construction of local hybrids as mediating instruments was seen to omit significant elements of the sustainability programmatic but, on a pragmatic level, they did facilitate local changes in relation to climate change impacts, energy use, resource use and waste reduction. Our analysis suggests that these hybrids allowed elements of the weak sustainability programmatic discourse to hybridise with more powerful discourses (e.g., new public management, austerity, and modernisation) thus enabling change in local organisational practices.