Building bridges to the future: Mapping the territory for developing social and environmental accountability

Social and environmental accounting research has been contributing to the accounting and management research literatures for several decades. Yet it has been marginalised by the majority of accounting and management researchers in their focus upon economic development and corporate financial management. The emergence of global warming and carbon emissions onto the centre stage of public debate has put social and environmental accountability in the spotlight and begun to attract greater numbers of researchers and journals to the social and environmental research waterhole. This paper reflects on the role of the research journal as a purveyor and shaper of social and environmental accountability research, now and into the future. It cautions against the distortion of research agendas occasioned by governmental research assessments, simplistic economics-focused journal rankings and commercial publisher-driven citation indexes. Quality in publishing is called upon to be reconstructed so as to liberate rather than constrain research in this field, while critique and engagement are proposed for serious development and co-habitation. A commitment to breaking out of traditional research design strait-jackets in search of novelty and innovation is advocated as a bridge to the future contribution of social and environmental research to policy, practice, society and ecology.