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The increasing responsibility of organisations towards society and the environment has inverted the relationship between accounting and accountability, leading to accountability-based accounting systems. This study aims to explore the debate on accountability for climate change within the integrating thinking (IT) perspective. Ascertaining the most significant trends in the debate around purposes and performance that characterise climate mitigation engagement and their connections, the study would explore if and to what extent organisations are tackling climate actions.

A narrative review of the extensive academic literature developed from the Kyoto Protocol to date was performed. After selecting a representative sample, papers were analysed with the support of a new analytical framework that involves three dimensions – answerability, enforcement and outcome – and governance schemes that emerge from the involvement of the private and public sector and civil society. With the support of NVivo software, themes arisen were analysed and coded. Key items were labelled, creating specific nodes and synthesised into the proposed framework.

A “silo approach” largely characterises the debate on accountability for climate change. The most significant reasons behind the shortcomings of extant climate actions may be retrieved firstly in the weakness of the motivations that guide organisations to operate in a climate-friendly way.

This study underlines the need for a 360° integrated approach for strategically tackling climate actions.

This study would represent a further step towards an integrated approach for studying organisations behaviours in the “climate war”, embracing the connectivity between purposes and outcomes, capitals and the relationships amongst the various stakeholders.

While prior studies predominantly focus on the overall impact of digital transformation on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, this study employs dynamic capability theory to examine two different dimensions of digital transformation, namely digital transformation quantity and digital transformation structure, and how they influence the ESG performance of enterprises. The mediating roles of social attention and green innovation are investigated to further explore the underlying mechanisms.

The authors apply fixed effects models and empirically test the hypotheses using samples of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2020. In addition, difference-in-differences and instrumental variable methods are used in the robustness test.

When digital transformation is categorized into quantity and structure, the impact mechanisms are found to be distinct. Externally, digital transformation quantity attracts social attention, aiding enterprises in evolutionary adaptability and acquiring resources to support ESG practices. Internally, digital transformation structure fosters green innovation, enabling enterprises to overcome technical obstacles and harness technology’s potential to enhance their ESG performance.

This study contributes to the current knowledge by differentiating digital transformation into quantity and structure, which helps to further explore the mechanism of digital transformation on ESG and address the research gap. Meanwhile, the concept of adaptability in the dynamic capability theory is employed to construct the model, offering a deeper perspective and expanding the theory. This nuanced investigation of the mediating effects of social attention and green innovation elucidates how different dimensions of digital transformation contribute to the development and utilization of dynamic capabilities, thereby enhancing enterprises’ ESG performance.

Drawing on agency theory and legitimacy theory perspectives, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting of listed companies in the Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE), Sri Lanka.

A sample of 148 listed companies was drawn from the CSE using stratified random sampling method and data were collected from the 2012 annual reports. The proposed hypotheses were tested using a hierarchical binary logistic regression.

This study documents that board size and dual leadership are positively associated with sustainability reporting and boards with female directors are negatively associated with sustainability reporting. This study also found that sustainability reporting is likely to be influenced by firm size and firm growth. Additionally, the study also reveals that younger firms are likely to adopt sustainability reporting.

This is the first study to examine the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting in Sri Lanka, considered as a developing economy with an emerging equity market.

This study aims to examine the mediating role played by corporate governance (CG) in the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and analyst forecast quality.

The authors raise three specific questions: Does CG play a mediating role in the relationship between CSR and analyst forecast quality? If so, is such mediation effect of CG reduced for firms with weak governance? Do firms with superior CSR performance experience higher analyst forecast quality through the mediation effect of CG?

The present results suggest that CG serves as a partial mediator that facilitates CSR’s positive influence on analyst forecast quality. However, further analyses show that in firms with a low governance score, CG does not have a mediation effect. Conversely, the authors find that firms with superior CSR performance have higher forecast quality through the mediation effect of CG. The authors also find that the mediation effect of CG is more pronounced for the environmental component than for the social component of CSR.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the role of CG as a mediator between CSR and analyst forecast quality and to reveal that the strength of this effect varies depending on firms’ CG level and CSR commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.

The author presents a sample consisting of data corresponding to 573 pension plans in relation to such aspects as financial performance, inception date, asset size, number of participants, custodial and management fees, and whether their managers adopt ethical screening or give part of their profits to social projects. On this data the author implements the fixed effects panel data model proposed by Vogelsang (2012).

The results obtained indicate that investors/consumers prefer traditional or solidarity pension plans to ethical pension plans. Furthermore, the findings show that ethical investors/consumers are more (less) sensitive to positive (negative) lagged returns than caring and traditional consumers, causing traditional consumers to contribute to pension plans that they already own.

The author does not know what types of environmental, social and corporate governance criteria have been adopted by ethical pension plan managers and the weight given to each of these criteria for selecting the stock of the firms in their portfolios that could influence in the investors’ behaviour.

The results obtained in the current paper show that investors invest less money in ethical pension plans than in traditional and solidarity pension plans; this could be due to the lack of information for their part. To solve this, management companies could increase the transparency about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments to encourage investors to invest in ethical products so these lead to raising CSR standards in companies, and therefore, sustainable development.

The Spanish socially responsible investment retail market is still at an early phase of development, and regulators should promote it in order to encourage firms to adopt business activities that take into account societal concerns.

This paper provides new evidence in a field little analysed. This paper contributes to the existing literature by focusing on examining the behaviour of pension funds investors whose investment time horizon is in the long-term while previous literature focus on analysing behaviour of mutual fund investors whose investment time horizon is in the short/medium term what could cause different investors’ behaviour.