Process and content: Visualizing the policy challenges of environmental management accounting

This chapter argues the policy challenge of environmental management accounting is getting decision-makers to understand they are dealing with a mess: a situation where disagreement and uncertainty exists. Finding shape and structure in messy situations is a pre-condition to designing and implementing effective policy. Visualising communication processes between policy makers and takers, and the content transmitted between them, supports the search for shape and structure. A series of images on process and content aspects of environmental management accounting are presented. Five images place secondary data into theoretical constructs of classical diffusion theory. Collectively, the images on communication processes and their consequences show that relying on top-down innovation through mass media distribution of advisories is ineffective in achieving widespread pro-environmental behaviour. Two images are then presented in a search to place environmental management accounting within a mapping on the causes and effects of management accounting. A tenuous link with research on how environmental uncertainty affects accounting policy choice is identified. But mainstream accounting and management conventions with respect to environmental uncertainty typically focus on environmental matters that exclude nature. Hence process and content images on environmental management accounting presented here illustrate the disagreement and uncertainty characteristics of a mess. Forming and implementing effective policy is not possible in a messy situation.