Environmental Management Maturity Stages and Environmental Management Accounting

Abstract

As of today, the environmental management maturity (EMM) and environmental management accounting (EMA) literature has established itself in its own right. Despite the obvious connection between these two fields of study, they have evolved along parallel paths with limited inter communication. This paper therefore aims to identify the use of EMA in different stages of EMM with a view to establishing a connection between these two fields. Data for this study was collected by identifying nine case organizations each from three different EMM stages. Accordingly, interviews, site visits and document analyses were used to collect data, which was analysed based on the environmental domain uses and functional applications of EMA in each EMM stage. The preliminary analyses of these selected organizations suggest that as the EMM level of increases, organizations depict a higher level of functional use of EMA for control and stewardship purposes despite the limited use of EMA for decision- making purposes. From the perspective of an environmental domain, the study finds that the use of integrative EMA tools is considerably low even in organizations with higher levels of EMM. These preliminary findings suggest that the use of EMA (or broadly, accounting) is still limited in the corporate environmental management. The study discusses some of the implications for theory and practice.