Accounting, Accountability and Society

The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR) based in the University of St Andrews, up in Scotland (one of the oldest UK universities), is a familiar entity to me. I was in fact Member of CSEAR until the early part of the twenty-first century when my research focus tweaked a bit. I have continued to admire many of the great things Prof. Rob Gray and many of his team members did and continue to do for CSEAR, first during his time at the University of Glasgow and when his career moved on to Saint Andrews, where he is now Emeritus Professor. It was therefore a great opportunity for me to attend the 7th Italian CSEAR Conference in Urbino, Italy, in September 2018, where I was fortunate to meet a number of great and long-standing members of the CSEAR’s family; it was an unforgettable conference for me personally. When I was asked to put this piece together for the book emanating from the Urbino Conference, it was one of the easiest and most honourable “yes”, I have had to say during my thirty something years in academia! It is therefore a great honour for me to write the Foreword to this addition to the literature focusing on Accounting, Accountability and Society. Browsing through many of the chapters that make up the book, one cannot but be impressed by the tenacity of the arguments and the information they contain. The United Nations has taken the issue of sustainable development seriously for more than 30 years; see, for example, “Our Common Future”, Brundtland Report 1987 the genesis of it all. The Eight Millennium Development Goals of September 2000 on global sustainable development came to an end in September 2015. The issues encompassed in the current UN Sustainable Development Goals 2030 have challenged both corporate and individual citizens of the world to behave and operate sustainably; this also requires corporate entities of the modern era to sustainably manage their dealings with all their classes of stakeholders including the environment, that is what will survive them in both their local and global markets and consequently survive the planet we all live in. We all owe this planet a compelling debt to ensure that things are not made unnecessarily difficult for future generations of the occupants of planet Earth, regardless of whether they are animate beings or inanimate objects, and many of the chapters in the book have eitherdirectly or indirectly amplified this point; needless to say, I am in total agreement with them. Let me conclude the piece by congratulating Profs. Mara Del BaIdo, Jesse Dillard, Maria-Gabriella Baldarelli and Massimo Ciambotti for this valuable addition to the literature; having browsed through it carefully, I am delighted to recommend it as a must-have companion to today’s sustainability and sustainable development scholars, practitioners and research students that reside in the length and breadth of our world who work in this field. I recommend the book to you all unreservedly.