Student intentions towards sustainability accounting in emerging countries (case Malaysia and Philippines)

When people think about sustainability, it usually brings to their mind helping the planet with recycling, saving energy and choosing the better option for the environment when possible. However, sustainability is much more. Sustainability accounting now gets attention worldwide. The accountants’ knowledge of the Triple Bottom Line, which is measuring sustainability performance with economic, social and environmental aspects, is increasing. It is not enough anymore to look at just profits and financial capital. Stakeholders want to see disclosures that include social, human and environmental aspects (Bremser, 2014). Education is said to be very important in achieving sustainable development. To put more focus on education, the United Nations have for example named years 2005-2014 the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Their goal is to integrate sustainable development into learning and promote changes of attitude towards sustainability. Similar programs to this are also in other parts of the world, as for example Australian National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (Hazelton & Haigh, 2010). Students also see sustainability as a very interesting topic. They realize that mastering sustainability accounting can be an advantage since they will probably be using it in their future jobs (Bremser, 2014). The main aim of this research is to understand the students’ intention towards sustainability accounting, in the emerging counties of Malaysia and Philippines. This research uses: content analysis to conclude about how sustainability accounting is combined to students` courses of their degree programs; a sustainability index model to understand how sustainable the schools are; and a questionnaire to collect data about students` future intentions on using sustainability accounting. The hypotheses were tested with OLS estimation and Gretl software. The questionnaire had overall 177 full responses together from Malaysia and Philippines. From the results we can see that the main findings are: the more sustainable the school is, the more their students care about the opinions of environmental responsibility of the people surrounding them, especially their professors; also, if the students have good resources to be environmentally responsible, they will more likely engage in sustainability accounting. We could not get support for the sustainability of the school affecting the attitude of students towards sustainability accounting. Neither we could not find support that a favorable attitude towards sustainability accounting of the students would increase their intention to engage in it. The main contributions of the present research were the consideration of the theory of planned behavior in a different context, which can be of assistance to the United Nations 2030 agenda trying to achieve sustainable development and especially to the 17 goals of the agenda. In addition, the study contributes to alert to the inclusion of the topic of sustainability on education and, lastly, it contributes to the research on emerging Southeast Asian countries in a sustainable development and sustainability accounting context, which is relevant as the quality of the sustainability reporting is lacking and the sustainable development has been very rapid