Stakeholder perspectives on accounting information : three essays on environmental accounting

Through their use of resources, their investments and their output, corporations have a significant impact on our natural environment. In that regard, the long term sustainability of the current business model is currently attracting widespread attention. However, corporations have access to several environmental management tools at both the technical and managerial levels. The challenge is to integrate and implement these tools in their business activities to improve corporate environmental performance. Among these tools, accounting plays a critical role in the environmental management of organizations as it directly relates to the measurement and disclosure of corporate environmental performance. The purpose of this dissertation, which comprises three essays, is to study the role of stakeholders in the environmental accounting-related issues of environmental investment, performance measurement and disclosure. The first essay focuses on environmental resource allocation decisions and specifically examines the influence of corporate governance over the intensity of environmental capital expenditures. Results show that governance mechanisms dedicated to stakeholder accountability and environmental protection increase the intensity of environmental capital expenditures. The second essay concentrates on environmental performance measurement by investigating the role played by stakeholders in the selection of internal environmental performance indicators. Results suggests that stakeholder influences over internal environmental performance metrics are organized along a continuum ranging from narrow unidirectional influence to broad interactive influence necessitating environmental benchmarking. The last essay shifts the attention toward voluntary environmental reporting. More specifically, I contrast corporate and non-corporate (stakeholder) environmental disclosure, focusing on a single organization and its critical stakeholders. Results from the analysis of these environmental reporting dynamics show that different disclosure patterns arise among the perspectives, ranging from uniformity to performance-neutral and performance-biased gaps between the case firm's and stakeholders' disclosures. Overall, these results lead to the conclusion that stakeholders influence environmental accounting, but the form and extent of their influence depends upon the nature of the stakeholder group and the environmental issue at stake. As a whole, by bringing nuances into the portrayal of stakeholder influences, the dissertation enhances our knowledge of firms-stakeholders interactions with respect to environmental accounting