Jul 2026· Journal of Accounting Literature· pp. 1-41· 0 citations· 125 references
Abstract
This study critically reviews sustainability accounting's research tensions, unintended consequences and explores ways to align accounting practices with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
The study reviews 283 empirical studies on sustainability accounting published between 2000 and 2024 using a PRISMA systematic strategy and analyses them through co-occurrence network analysis and the Antecedents-Decisions-Outcomes and Theories-Contexts-Methods (ADO-TCM) framework.
The review reveals that sustainability accounting research remains epistemologically fragmented, methodologically conservative and weakly aligned with the SDGs. Existing frameworks often tacitly prioritize financial logics, marginalizing ecological justice, social transformation and externalities in governance. Although themes like circularity, stakeholder governance and technological innovation show promise, they risk instrumentalization without deeper theoretical and educational reforms and standardized metrics. Moreover, the field's regulatory and conceptual structures encourage symbolic compliance, greenwashing, disciplinary silos and exclusion of global south perspectives, ultimately hindering genuine SDGs alignment.
The study draws largely on reputable journals and hence may unintentionally reinforce dominant academic hierarchies, marginalizing diverse epistemologies and voices from underrepresented contexts. These risks narrow critical engagement with sustainability accounting's ideological underpinnings and its alignment with justice, pluralism and the SDGs.
The study calls for interdisciplinary curriculum reform, regulatory pluralism and inclusive standard-setting, highlighting the importance of dialogic accountability through the integration of indigenous knowledge and holistic materiality across policy, practice and education.
The study combines co-occurrence network analysis with ADO-TCM integration to critically reorient sustainability accounting research for advancing SDG-aligned, justice-centered practices.
Behavioural sustainability has emerged as a strategically significant construct for understanding how sustainability becomes embedded in organisational routines, decisions, and governance systems rather than remaining at the level of symbolic commitment. Despite growing scholarly attention, the construct remains conceptually contested and its relationship to established frameworks such as corporate social responsibility, green human resource management, and sustainability implementation has not been critically examined. This systematic literature review addresses that gap by examining how behavioural sustainability is conceptualised and strategically integrated within firms. Following PRISMA 2020 reporting principles, the review analyses 42 peer‐reviewed studies published between 2005 and 2025 using descriptive mapping and theory‐informed thematic synthesis. Three interconnected analytical lenses guide the review: behavioural microfoundations, institutional and stakeholder dynamics, and management control and governance systems. The findings demonstrate that apparently divergent conceptualisations of behavioural sustainability reflect different emphases within a coherent multi‐level construct spanning individual behaviour, organisational routinisation, and system‐level governance, rather than representing genuinely incompatible theoretical positions. Four mechanism families are identified as supporting strategic integration: human resource practices that build behavioural capability, legitimisation processes that move sustainability beyond symbolic compliance, stakeholder engagement and translation processes that stabilise priorities across organisational levels, and governance interventions that embed sustainability in decision structures and accountability systems. Evidence on long‐term durability remains uneven, with stronger support from longitudinal and case‐based studies than from cross‐sectional research, and the review identifies procedural decoupling at the governance level as a significant but underexplored risk in the literature. Interpreting these findings, the study develops the Behavioural Sustainability Integration Framework (BSIF), which conceptualises strategic integration as an iterative design‐govern‐reinforce architecture and advances four propositions for future empirical testing. The framework contributes to theory by specifying the causal relationships through which behavioural sustainability becomes durable, identifying the boundary conditions under which each function operates, and positioning behavioural sustainability as a distinct strategy construct that addresses an explanatory gap that adjacent frameworks do not fill.
C. M. Nkiko· Corporate Social Responsibil...· 0 citations
The intersection between corporate entities and political institutions—commonly referred to as corporate political connections (CPCs)—significantly influences firms' strategic conduct and their environmental obligations. Although academic interest in this area has grown, the ethical dimensions of CPCs in relation to environmental sustainability remain insufficiently developed and conceptually fragmented. This paper delivers a systematic literature review (SLR) of 72 scholarly articles to investigate how CPCs shape firms' environmental outcomes across two analytically distinct dimensions: environmental
performance
, capturing what firms
do
in terms of green innovation, emissions reduction, and pollution control, and environmental
disclosure
, capturing what firms
report
, including the extent, quality, and credibility of their sustainability communications. The review uncovers a marked increase in publications over recent years, with a strong empirical focus on China and the United States, and theoretical grounding predominantly in institutional and resource‐based perspectives. Research to date has primarily examined individual‐level connections, such as politically affiliated executives, whereas broader organizational political behaviors, including lobbying, political financing, and embedded political mechanisms, have received limited scrutiny. Importantly, the existing literature has disproportionately focused on environmental performance outcomes, whereas the qualitative dimensions of environmental disclosure, including readability, tone, specificity, and potential greenwashing, remain largely underexplored. This review exposes major conceptual and empirical gaps, advocating for a shift in scholarly focus toward ethical, normative, and governance‐oriented explorations of CPCs. We recommend further inquiry into the ethical risks of CPCs, their role in misleading sustainability practices, and the value of cross‐national institutional comparisons. Integrating ethical analysis into CPC research is vital for promoting responsible political engagement and advancing authentic environmental sustainability.
Ahmed A. Elamer, M. Nasr, Karim Mahran· Business Strategy and the En...· 0 citations
The sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC) has become an influential framework for integrating sustainability into strategic management. Despite its growing adoption, research remains fragmented, and insufficiently aligned with the sustainability regulatory frameworks. Drawing on institutional and goal‐setting theory, this study examines whether SBSC indicators enable strategic integration or reveal compliance lags with respect to sustainability requirements. A Systematic Literature Review is conducted combining bibliometric analysis of 205 peer‐reviewed papers and content analysis of the 66 most influential contributions. Findings reveal persistent reliance on early conceptual foundations of the SBSC and limited integration of regulatory requirements. Relevant gaps emerge at the indicator‐level alignment between SBSC and ESRS, particularly regarding pollution, water use, biodiversity, value‐chain social aspects, and governance‐related metrics. This study contributes to the SBSC literature by providing an overview of its evolution, evaluating its alignment with ESRS, indicating potential avenues for future research, and highlighting some managerial implications.
B. Amico, Rafaela Gjergji, Valentina Lazzarotti· Corporate Social Responsibil...· 0 citations
This study examines the intersection of stakeholder engagement and value co-creation in tourism, synthesizing theoretical and empirical contributions spanning two decades of scholarship to develop an integrative governance framework applicable across destination management contexts.
A systematic literature review following the PRISMA 2020 protocol was conducted across nine international databases, covering publications from 2004 to 2025. The final sample of 59 peer-reviewed articles was selected through a four-stage screening process combining dual-reviewer eligibility assessment and a 50-point quality scale, yielding a mean quality score of 38.6.
Thematic synthesis of the 59-article corpus reveals a shift from transactional stakeholder consultation toward collaborative value ecosystems. The study introduces the COCREATE Model, an eight-dimension framework grounded in the reviewed evidence, and shows, through comparison with five antecedent frameworks, that equity is a constitutive rather than a contextual dimension of co-creation governance, absent from prior integrative models. Fourteen of the 59 articles identify power asymmetry as the primary inhibitor of co-creation outcomes, which grounds this elevation of equity.
The COCREATE Model offers destination managers, policymakers and platform developers a set of implementation indicators for auditing the equity, transparency and accountability of co-creation processes, and it provides researchers with a structured 2025–2035 agenda for empirical validation across contrasting destination governance settings.
The COCREATE Model is the first framework to integrate service-dominant logic, stakeholder engagement theory and digital governance into a single operational architecture and to position equity as a structural rather than a contextual dimension of co-creation governance.
Anderson Antônio Lima, H. Ramos, Thiago de Luca Sant'ana Ribeiro et al.· Journal of Hospitality and T...· 0 citations
A systematic review following the PRISMA guidelines, this study analyzes Scopus-indexed papers published from 2020 to 2026 in order to shed light on how digital transformation enables sustainability-oriented outcomes and whether these contributions seem rooted in organizational change rather than represent aspirational disclosures of sustainability-related information. In the initial search phase, a total of 1,208 records were identified; after screening, retrieval and eligibility assessment of these studies from both electronic databases and hand-searching, just 78 studies were included in the final synthesis. Our findings show that digital transformation drives sustainability in six main avenues—namely ESG governance, eco-innovation, decarbonization, circular economy practices, digital maturity and social sustainability. However, with digital transformation being identified as sustainability by other means, without appropriate organizational capabilities and data governance that include adequate data and analytics support for innovation routines, regulatory pressures and strategic decision-making processes to be adopted together at scale across an organization because they are complementary. Also, the review suggests that by relying heavily on a style of quantitative testing based on looking for associations between concepts in datasets empirically available, research suffers from conceptual inconsistencies and uneven coverage across empirical contexts. The review presents a new conceptualization for digital transformation as an enabler of sustainability, which comes with execution conditions and identifies future research agendas to distinguish genuine sustainability effects from the simple prominence of sustainability.
I. Suteja, P. Purwanto, Felix Siswanto· Eduvest - Journal Of Univers...· 0 citations
A Systematic Literature Review that analyzed 61 primary studies selected from 126 initial records reveals a clear association between cost reduction and increased productivity within the economic dimension; waste reduction reflects progress in the environmental dimension; and the improvement of quality and value delivered to stakeholders aligns with the social dimension.
