Abstract
The economic, social, and environmental contingencies of the last two decades have called into question the need for public sector organizations to align accounting practices with sustainable concerns. Sustainability refers to the ability of organizations to co-create economic value in the long run, involving all stakeholders, safeguarding the environment, and generating well-being for the community. While this topic attracts increasing interests from several perspectives, there is a lack of a comprehensive assessment of how academia is debating it. Therefore, this paper reviews the field of sustainability, accounting, and reporting (SAR) in the public sector in order to develop insights into how the literature is developing the theme of public value (PV) co-creation, offer a critique of the state-of-the-art to date, and outline future research opportunities. The study is based on a structured literature review (SLR) methodology that enables studying the corpus of scholarly literature, developing insights, critical reflections, and future research paths. The results highlight that, although the involvement of stakeholders appears as crucial for developing SAR practices in the public sector, scholars have not yet adopted a PV co-creation perspective to this phenomenon, since, at best, previous studies only focused on the stakeholders’ involvement, without considering other aspects such as synergistic integration of resources and alignment of purposes. Therefore, academics should rethink their research setting and implications to provide a significant contribution by conducting studies capable of leading future development of SA in the public sector.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, it has become increasingly acknowledged that organizations’ performance must be assessed taking into account organizations’ sustainable impact on the environment and the society at large [1,2,3,4]
The concerns of economic, social, environmental, and sustainability governance information has supplemented the traditionally exclusive interest of the financial one, both in private and public sectors [5,6]. This issue is notably relevant for public sector organizations, which provide important services for current and future communities’ members, and are under greater accountability pressures to communicate the sustainability of their activities [7,8]
As this paper aims at critically analyzing the corpus of extant knowledge on sustainability accounting (SA) in the public sector to identify its connection to public value (PV) co-creation, the structured literature review (SLR) is here chosen as the most appropriated method of investigation
Summary
Over the last two decades, it has become increasingly acknowledged that organizations’ performance must be assessed taking into account organizations’ sustainable impact on the environment and the society at large [1,2,3,4]. Aiming at pursuing sustainable policies, public sector organizations acknowledge the relevance of involving stakeholders for developing practices of SAR [25,26], and to identify what is valuable for them and what is their information demand [27,28] In this regard, the involvement of private partners and civil society in the definition of policies, design, and provision of public services, as well as in the processes of allocation and reporting of the use of public resources, has become so fundamental that scholars refer to PV co-creation [29,30]. Among the systematic types of literature reviews, the SLR is increasingly resorted to for reviews in the field of social science, including accounting and public sector accounting, as a method which analyses extant research on a topic through precise steps of investigation and research questions, in a way to develop critical insights on that topic and depict possible future research paths [45,46]. The section details the SLR as it applies to the purpose of this paper
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