دستیابی به اهداف توسعه پایدار سازمان ملل: تحقیقات حسابداری Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: An enabling role for accounting research

1 Introduction Research into the roles of accounting in furthering sustainable development has expanded, and become more sophisticated, over the three decades since the concept of sustainable development was proposed by the seminal Brundtland Report (United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (UNWCED), 1987) as being a guiding principle bridging environmental and human development concerns (Bebbington and Larrinaga, 2014; Bebbington et al., 2014). In the most recent iteration of the global sustainable development agenda, the United Nations’ Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations (UN), 2015) adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are intended to “stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet” (p. 3). These SDGs are increasingly being referred to in policy circles simply as ‘The Global Goals’. While being intergovernmental commitments, the SDGs have rapidly gained traction and salience among a broad range of actors beyond the 193 member states of the UN who unanimously endorsed them, such as public policy bodies, NGOs and many public sector and private sector organizations (including many businesses and professional bodies). As evidence later in this paper demonstrates, elements of the accounting profession are among actors who have enthusiastically embraced the SDGs, seeing a pivotal role for accountants and accounting in supporting their realization. In the academic world, SDG-related research has begun to emerge in several disciplines, including business and management (Annan-Diab and Molinari, 2017; Schaltegger et al., 2017; Storey et al., 2017). Some of this research identifies and develops the energizing effects of committing to an SDG framework in guiding organizational policy and action. However the SDGs and their potential and saliency have only just started to make an appearance in the accounting literature (see Bebbington Russell and Thomson, in press).