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Publication
Student intentions towards sustainability accounting in emerging countries (case Malaysia and Philippines)
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Abstract(s)
When people think about sustainability, it usually brings to their mind helping the planet
with recycling, saving energy and choosing the better option for the environment when
possible. However, sustainability is much more. Sustainability accounting now gets attention
worldwide. The accountants’ knowledge of the Triple Bottom Line, which is measuring
sustainability performance with economic, social and environmental aspects, is increasing.
It is not enough anymore to look at just profits and financial capital. Stakeholders want to
see disclosures that include social, human and environmental aspects (Bremser, 2014).
Education is said to be very important in achieving sustainable development. To put more
focus on education, the United Nations have for example named years 2005-2014 the Decade
of Education for Sustainable Development. Their goal is to integrate sustainable
development into learning and promote changes of attitude towards sustainability. Similar
programs to this are also in other parts of the world, as for example Australian National
Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (Hazelton & Haigh, 2010). Students also
see sustainability as a very interesting topic. They realize that mastering sustainability
accounting can be an advantage since they will probably be using it in their future jobs
(Bremser, 2014).
The main aim of this research is to understand the students’ intention towards sustainability
accounting, in the emerging counties of Malaysia and Philippines.
This research uses: content analysis to conclude about how sustainability accounting is
combined to students` courses of their degree programs; a sustainability index model to
understand how sustainable the schools are; and a questionnaire to collect data about
students` future intentions on using sustainability accounting. The hypotheses were tested
with OLS estimation and Gretl software. The questionnaire had overall 177 full responses
together from Malaysia and Philippines. From the results we can see that the main findings
are: the more sustainable the school is, the more their students care about the opinions of
environmental responsibility of the people surrounding them, especially their professors;
also, if the students have good resources to be environmentally responsible, they will more
likely engage in sustainability accounting. We could not get support for the sustainability of
the school affecting the attitude of students towards sustainability accounting. Neither we could not find support that a favorable attitude towards sustainability accounting of the
students would increase their intention to engage in it.
The main contributions of the present research were the consideration of the theory of
planned behavior in a different context, which can be of assistance to the United Nations
2030 agenda trying to achieve sustainable development and especially to the 17 goals of the
agenda. In addition, the study contributes to alert to the inclusion of the topic of sustainability
on education and, lastly, it contributes to the research on emerging Southeast Asian countries
in a sustainable development and sustainability accounting context, which is relevant as the
quality of the sustainability reporting is lacking and the sustainable development has been
very rapid.
Description
Keywords
Sustentabilidade Contabilidade para sustentabilidade Intenções dos Estudantes Países emergentes Teoria do Comportamento Planeado (TPB) Educação