Concerns about the adverse environmental (and social) impact of organisations have a longstanding history. Transnational corporations have a bigger impact than most – but also the opportunity to bring about and influence change beyond the realms of their own activity. They are ‘keystone actors’, where the effects of human activity on global change are manifest, and they have the capability to drive global levels of change. Accountingmay not be the first area that springs tomind when it comes to producing positive change in these problemareas, but accountants are critical to connecting organisations and ecology, and two core functions of the accounting craft can be effective. Firstly, accounting techniques can be used to establish organisational control over impacts. Secondly, information about organisational impacts plays a role in discharging accountability to external parties (including shareholders, capital market participants, funders, regulators and other stakeholder groups who affect or are affected by organisations). While social and environmental accounting was considered a ‘fringe’ activity 30 years ago, it has increasingly become mainstream as the nature of environmental problems have become better understood. It is nowmore widely appreciated that environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change pose significant risks to the ecological integrity of ecosystems that themselves underpin human wellbeing. Likewise, focus on the environmental effects of organisations has expanded to include how ongoing organisational functions depend on natural systems: itself linked to risk assessment. As a result, rather than environmental effects constituting an unexpected and relatively minor side effect of organisational activity, they have become a central focus of science, policy and practice worlds. Our work at the PentlandCentre, andmy own research as part of the SeaBOS (SeafoodBusiness forOcean Stewardship) project, emerges fromthis context, shaping howour work as researchers and scientistsmight be brought to bear for impact on practice and policy. At the same time, we seek to respond to the ‘grand societal challenges’ presented by global environmental change, and the attendant social and economic dimensions, by using the ‘keystoneactor’ approach, illustrated by the SeaBOSproject focused on global seafood providers. Transnational corporations shape the context in which organisations operate, the rules they are subject to, and the flow of goods and services across the world. They also connect production and consumption through their global supply chains and link all aspects of the global economy. These connections might include common shareholders, lenders and insurers, or they might be listed on common stock exchanges. We use the language of ‘tele-coupling’ to describe how these companies connect physical spaces across the planet and span economic entities in the global economy, and how actions in one part of the system can have outcomes in other parts of the system. These effects can be quite devious and hard to track, but we know fromdecades of research that tele-coupling occurs both positively and negatively – if a contract is poorly worded, then in another part of the world workers can be exploited in labour terms; conversely, well-designed 28 |
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