PLEASE CITE THIS: an exploratory paper on citations, impacts and the social accounting literature

This paper seeks to use the increasingly influential citation and impact data to explore the contours of the social and environmental accounting (SEA) literature. Our ambitions are fourfold. First, we offer a more nuanced understanding of the journals in which we tend to publish SEA research. Second, we tease out what might plausibly be thought to be one indication of the ‘most influential’ SEA papers. Third, we offer a substantive cautionary note about the dangers of the careless use of citations as singular measures of ‘quality’ or ‘importance’, etc. Finally, we place the growing SEA literature in a wider context which both flatters and challenges the community that SEAJ seeks to serve.

Linking classroom learning and research to advance ideas about social-ecological resilience

There is an increasing demand in higher education institutions for training in complex environmental problems. Such training requires a careful mix of conventional methods and innovative solutions, a task not always easy to accomplish. In this paper we review literature on this theme, highlight relevant advances in the pedagogical literature, and report on some examples resulting from our recent efforts to teach complex environmental issues. The examples range from full credit courses in sustainable development and research methods to project-based and in-class activity units. A consensus from the literature is that lectures are not sufficient to fully engage students in these issues. A conclusion from the review of examples is that problem-based and project-based, e.g., through case studies, experiential learning opportunities, or real-world applications, learning offers much promise. This could greatly be facilitated by online hubs through which teachers, students, and other members of the practitioner and academic community share experiences in teaching and research, the way that we have done here.

Compensation and Rewards for Environmental Services (CRES) and efficient design of contracts in developing countries. Behavioral insights from a natural field experiment

The use of economic incentives for biodiversity (mostly Compensation and Reward for Environmental Services including Payment for ES) has been widely supported in the past decades and became the main innovative policy tools for biodiversity conservation worldwide. These policy tools are often based on the insight that rational actors perfectly weigh the costs and benefits of adopting certain behaviors and well-crafted economic incentives and disincentives will lead to socially desirable development scenarios. This rationalist mode of thought has provided interesting insights and results, but it also misestimates the context by which ‘real individuals’ come to decisions, and the multitude of factors influencing development sequences. In this study, our goal is to examine how these policies can take advantage of some unintended behavioral reactions that might in return impact, either positively or negatively, general policy performances. We test the effect of income's origin (‘Low effort’ based money vs. ‘High effort’ based money) on spending decisions (Necessity vs. Superior goods) and subsequent pro social preferences (Future pro-environmental behavior) within Madagascar rural areas, using a natural field experiment. Our results show that money obtained under low effort leads to different consumption patterns than money obtained under high efforts: superior goods are more salient in the case of low effort money. In parallel, money obtained under low effort leads to subsequent higher pro social behavior. Compensation and rewards policies for ecosystem services may mobilize knowledge on behavioral biases to improve their design and foster positive spillovers on their development goals.

Spirit of corporate social responsibility transforming from corporatism to socialized capitalism

This paper offers a critique of current corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in context of global trends. The legitimate modelling of CSR has yet to engage firm and political decision making with wider Society stakeholders. There is urgent need to transform towards socialized capitalism in which separate CSR board may focus on social and environmental concerns and offer more collaborative solutions to global/local CSR issues. This is underpinned with a need for returning to original moral purpose of CSR that has become eroded by narrower short term rational justifications.

Anticipating future risk in social-ecological systems using fuzzy cognitive mapping: the case of wildfire in the Chiquitania, Bolivia

Understanding complex social-ecological systems, and anticipating how they may respond to rapid change, requires an approach that incorporates environmental, social, economic, and policy factors, usually in a context of fragmented data availability. We employed fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) to integrate these factors in the assessment of future wildfire risk in the Chiquitania region, Bolivia. In this region, dealing with wildfires is becoming increasingly challenging due to reinforcing feedbacks between multiple drivers. We conducted semi-structured interviews and constructed different FCMs in focus groups to understand the regional dynamics of wildfire from diverse perspectives. We used FCM modelling to evaluate possible adaptation scenarios in the context of future drier climatic conditions. Scenarios also considered possible failure to respond in time to the emergent risk. This approach proved of great potential to support decision-making for risk management. It helped identify key forcing variables and generate insights into potential risks and trade-offs of different strategies. All scenarios showed increased wildfire risk in the event of more droughts. The ‘Hands-off’ scenario resulted in amplified impacts driven by intensifying trends, affecting particularly the agricultural production. The ‘Fire management’ scenario, which adopted a bottom-up approach to improve controlled burning, showed less trade-offs between wildfire risk reduction and production compared to the ‘Fire suppression’ scenario. Findings highlighted the importance of considering strategies that involve all actors who use fire, and the need to nest these strategies for a more systemic approach to manage wildfire risk. The FCM model could be used as a decision-support tool and serve as a ‘boundary object’ to facilitate collaboration and integration of different forms of knowledge and perceptions of fire in the region. This approach has also the potential to support decisions in other dynamic frontier landscapes around the world that are facing increased risk of large wildfires.

Doing well by talking good? A topic modelling-assisted discourse study of corporate social responsibility

Using the novel technique of topic modelling, this paper examines thematic patterns and their changes over time in a large corpus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports produced in the oil sector. Whereas previous research on corporate communications has been small-scale or interested in selected lexical aspects and thematic categories identified ex ante, our approach allows for thematic patterns to emerge from the data. The analysis reveals a number of major trends and topic shifts pointing to changing practices of CSR. Nowadays ‘people’, ‘communities’ and ‘rights’ seem to be given more prominence, whereas ‘environmental protection’ appears to be less relevant. Using more established corpus-based methods, we subsequently explore two top phrases - ‘human rights’ and ‘climate change’ that were identified as representative of the shifting thematic patterns. Our approach strikes a balance between the purely quantitative and qualitative methodologies and offers applied linguists new ways of exploring discourse in large collections of texts.