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This study explores the extent of environmental management and reporting regulations in Nigeria, highlighting areas of inadequacies in regulatory enforcement and companies’ compliance. We approach the review within the context of the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (SDA).

This chapter is based on a systematic review of extant environmental regulations and academic literature.

The results show several inadequacies with respect to Nigeria’s environmental management and reporting regulations. We specifically note the changing environmental management and reporting landscape in Nigeria birthing several emerging mandatory reporting codes. We find that fragmented reporting regulations and inappropriate sanctions are responsible for the unsatisfactory compliance and disclosure level noted among firms in the country. Additionally, weak enforcement, funding limitations, unrealistic financial penalties, and general implementation deficits remain factors impeding effective environmental management practice in Nigeria.

This research provides insight into environmental management and reporting inadequacies in Nigeria, and the actions regulators and firm managers need to take on board to help the country actualize the UN 2030 SDA.

The main goal of the current research was to investigate whether and how leaders in health care organizations can stimulate incident reporting and error management by “walking the safety talk” (enacted priority of safety).

Open interviews (N=26) and a cross-sectional questionnaire (N=183) were conducted at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital (REH) in The Netherlands.

As hypothesized, leaders’ enacted priority of safety was positively related to incident reporting and error management, and the relation between leaders’ enacted priority of safety and error management was mediated by incident reporting. The interviews yielded rich data on (near) incidents, the leaders’ role in (non)reporting, and error management, grounding quantitative findings in concrete case descriptions.

We support previous theorizing by providing empirical evidence showing that (1) enacted priority of safety has a stronger relationship with incident reporting than espoused priority of safety and (2) the previously implied positive link between incident reporting and error management indeed exists. Moreover, our findings extend our understanding of behavioral integrity for safety and the mechanisms through which it operates in medical settings.

Our findings indicate that for the promotion of incident reporting and error management, active reinforcement of priority of safety by leaders is crucial.

Social sciences researchers, health care researchers and health care practitioners can utilize the findings of the current paper in order to help leaders create health care systems characterized by higher incident reporting and more constructive error handling.

Over the last few decades, corporate environmental reporting (CER) has received substantial attention due to complex societal and ecological challenges experienced at a global scale. While there has been growth in CER research across the world, we know very little of the state of CER research in Africa. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive literature review of CER in sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate its current state, uncover gaps in extant studies and identify areas for further research in the region. We perform a metasearch on the Financial Times Top 50 journals in addition to wider analyses using African Journals Online (AJOL) and Google Scholar between 2008 and 2020. Though there is some progress in interrogating CER in the region, there is much leeway for further research into how public and private corporations provide an account for their interaction with nature. Extant studies have examined how CER is often subsumed within corporate social responsibility initiatives while other studies explore ways in which CER can provide accountability mechanisms in the mining sector of select countries. Important areas of future research include the influences of legal, cultural and political systems on the level of CER, the tensions between economic development driven by multinational corporations and the necessity for ecological protection. Finally, further research could investigate the role CER can play in encouraging specific corporate disclosures around GHG emissions, especially given global efforts being undertaken to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The belief that modern organisations have responsibility for their stakeholders, community and society has existed for many decades (Carroll & Shabana, 2010). In this context, there is increasing demand for the non-financial factors (e.g. corporate social responsibility (CSR), natural and human capitals) from stakeholders for making the appropriate business decision (Eccles & Saltzman, 2011). This information of the organisation is therefore required to not only disclose relevant and reliable information, but also monitor corporate executives.

In the other side, corporation reports are criticised as they do not provide the whole business picture of the way organisations organise financial and non-financial elements to creating value yet. It has ignored or reported just a part of the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) impact made by an organisation (Flower, 2015). As a consequence, there has been a call for improving firm report on environmental, CSR and corporate governance in particular, and additional factors that can potentially impact on business performance in general.

Recently, various corporation reports related to environmental, social activities and sustainability have been introduced, and integrated reporting (IR) is one of them. IR framework is introduced as a new standard for corporate communication. It is ‘a concise communication about how an organisation’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects lead to the creation of value over the short, medium and long term’. A number of important outcomes are attributed to IR including satisfying the information needs of stakeholders and driving organisational change towards more sustainable outcomes (Eccles & Krzus, 2010); reducing reputational risk and allowing companies to make better financial and non-financial decisions; and helping to break down operational and reporting silos in organisations and improving systems and processes (Stubbs & Higgins, 2012). Since the IR emphasise the integration of financial and non-financial data into one report, it calls for experience and knowledge from not only the board as management role but also accountant as practice role to deal with this emerging issue.

This chapter considers the problem of the link between how to reporting the ESG information, the management role board and practice role of accountants in organisation to successfully embed ESG information into the overall corporation strategy. We identify the issues with the demand of ESG information from stakeholders and the lack of connecting and integrating the environmental and corporate social sustainability information into organisation report. We explore the development of IR and integrated thinking (InTh) and the opportunities for board in integrating ESG information into practices and eliminating the ESG and reputational risks. Finally, we consider how management accountant via adopting IR and practising InTh can act as the important role in providing and delivering the better ESG information to stakeholders.

The aim of this chapter is to determine the need for water management and accounting.

This chapter first gives an overview of water-related business risks and exposes the need for sound corporate water management and accounting; it then critically examines water-related issues from an accountability perspective. Furthermore, it gives an overview of Australian Standardised Water Accounting (SWA) and General Purpose Water Accounting (GPWA) as possible practices to strengthen water disclosure.

The present study confirms the need for, and the importance of, transparent, high-quality, credible and comparable water disclosure. Water is considered a public good and involves a public interest and, consequently, public responsibility for its usage, management and protection. Following this line of reasoning, the chapter draws attention to the need for accountability to be ‘public’ or at least shared between crucial stakeholders (government – at national and international levels, water industries, communities, environmentalists, NGOs, etc.).

Company efforts are commonly focused on internal and self-referred operations. The different and conflicting uses that may be made of water, and the fact that water is geographically and temporally sensitive, necessitate a search for more flexible and more extended forms of accountability. An implication of these findings is the need and opportunity to switch focus from a single/private perspective to a more general/public one, with benefits for all the stakeholders.

This research enhances our understanding of water management and accounting and may serve as a sound base for future studies on this challenging topic.

Part III reviews the uses and effects of materiality as an accounting, legal, audit, and managerial concept. After mentioning several uses of materiality as a legal concept and explaining the FASB’s proposed direction to avoid an accounting definition, it goes in depth to the differences in the respective definitions, applications, practical interactions, and different nature of the legal and accounting views. It then draws on the differences between audit and accounting uses of materiality.

It counterbalances the interests and positions of the various stakeholders involved, such as investors, preparers, standard-setters, auditors, regulators, financial analysts, and other users of the financial statements. It shows that those who regulate, use, decide, and assess materiality are different subjects.

Finally, the part capitalizes on the author’s vast experience in industry to theorize a plethora of alternative and complementary models of materiality with their pros and cons.

Nowadays, social and environmental reporting is approached in different ways, paths and fields by either large-, small-, or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). However, as demonstrated by previous scholars, SMEs have been critically discussed because they provide lack of proper sustainability disclosure. The fact that the predominant approach of SMEs toward social responsibility is often “sunken” and not “explicit” can drive the lack of disclosure. Furthermore, unstructured communication practices create difficulties in measuring and reporting the sustainability reporting phenomenon in SMEs. The aim of our study is to shed light on the activity of SMEs’ sustainability reporting and disclosure, specifically, by addressing the variables that influence the choice of the guidelines used to prepare sustainability reports.

The research has been carried out by using qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The empirical evidence is based on all the Italian companies, mostly SMEs, that were certified in 2011 as having adopted both environmental (i.e., ISO14001 or EMAS) and social (i.e., SA8000) management systems. A multivariate linear regression model has been developed to address the influence of several variables (i.e., financial performance, size, time after achievement of the certifications, group/conglomerate control, etc.) on the guidelines’ choice for preparing sustainability reports.

Our findings demonstrate that SMEs prefer to use simple guidelines such as those guidelines that are mandatory under management system certifications. However, the sustainability disclosure driven by the adoption of international guidelines may be more complex if the SME is controlled within a group of companies or if a significant amount of time has passed since the certification date. As such, we developed a taxonomy of their different behavioral drivers according to a legitimacy theory approach.

At this stage, our study didn’t focus on the contents’ quality of the disclosure and reporting practices adopted by SMEs, which is obviously a worthwhile and important area for further research. Furthermore, the analysis took into account the impact of a number of easily accessible variables; therefore, it can be extended to investigate the effect on disclosure of other relevant variables (i.e., nature of the board of directors, age, and industrial sector in which the company operates) as well as contexts prevailing in other countries.

The study represents an important contribution for understanding how and why managers might use externally focused disclosure on social and environmental issues to benefit the company’s legitimacy.

Our study provides interesting insights for policy makers who require social or environmental certification when calling for tenders or specific EU contracts, in order to put aside the “brand” or “symbol” and really focus on the disclosed practices.

Previous studies have provided only a few evidence about reporting practices and related influencing features of SMEs’ sustainability actions. As such, the study wishes to make a significant contribution to the existing literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by providing relevant insights about the factors which influence the guidelines used by SMEs in preparing their sustainability reports.

Attribution bias can be costly to firms because it hinders decision makers’ ability to infer the real cause of prior events and take corrective action to improve future performance. This study extends prior research by examining whether and how the presence of variance reporting from accounting systems affects firm profitability through a labor cost management decision that is highly susceptible to attribution bias. Our results support the prediction that the presence of variance reporting (process feedback) increases the likelihood of belief revision and corrective action related to the systematic error, and thus increases overall profitability for the firm. The findings of our study propose a solution to attribution and learning problems observed when decision makers are responsible for both cost management and bids as documented in prior literature.