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Abstract
The effective transfer of accounting education and knowledge between countries with differing economic and cultural contexts requires recognition of their individual institutional frameworks. The design and management of knowledge transfer and similar projects is a core activity of agencies such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This paper reports on a UNEP project which aimed to support a small number of selected developing countries in building their capacities to develop and raise finance for cleaner production projects, in particular that part of the project represented by a programme to develop and disseminate educational materials which would demonstrate how management accounting and financial skills can be adapted and applied for this purpose. It adopts an institutional theory perspective as the basis for analysis of the programme and uses this to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme and the potential of institutional theory to help to guide the design of future similar projects.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Division of Technology, Industry and Economics of the United Nations Environment Programme for its openness and willingness to co-operate in the research and writing of this article, and the editors of this themed edition and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions.
Notes
There is currently a UNEP/United Nations International Development Organization (UNIDO) NCPC in 23 separate countries across the world; for further details, see www.uneptie.org and www.unido.org.
Capacity building is a term in general use within the UN (and elsewhere) to refer to programmes and activities that aim to develop in the beneficiaries the knowledge, competences and infrastructure which are needed to deal with a particular issue.
In 1998, the four-year project Strategies and mechanisms for promoting investments in cleaner production in developing countries, generally referred to as the FCPI project, was designed by UNEP's Division of Technology, Industry and Economics (DTIE) on behalf of the Royal Government of Norway. This represented a continuation of Norway's previous support for the transfer of environmental knowledge generally, and in particular, for CP through capacity-building projects, which have been implemented in various developing countries by the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation in cooperation with the World Cleaner Production Society, following the guidance of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Citation1997). In February 1999, UNEP/DTIE started FCPI project implementation with US$5 million of Norway's international development aid budget.
Cleaner Production has become common terminology in environmental management. Synonyms and near-synonyms include pollution prevention (P2), eco-efficiency, clean technology, and waste minimization. Their common feature is that they all aim to identify and support the implementation of practices in industry which are simultaneously both positive in their environmental effect and economically profitable for the companies which implement them.
Concern for organizations' environmental performance is increasingly being extended to social performance as part of a broader concept of sustainability. Since the UNEP project was specifically concerned only with environmental performance, this paper does not attempt to address this wider dimension.
EMA has been defined as the generation, analysis and use of financial and related non-financial information in order to integrate corporate environmental and economic policies, and build sustainable business (Bartolomeo et al., Citation2000).
Gray et al. (Citation1996) identify a spectrum of seven attitudes to organizational social responsibility (which includes but extends beyond environmental impacts) ranging from, at one extreme, deep ecologists, radical feminists and socialists through to expedients and pristine capitalists. The groups at the first extreme tend to perceive accountancy as currently practised as reflecting traditional power relationships in society (of the human race over other species, of masculine constructs over feminine values, and of capitalists over labour) and would argue that accounting has a potential to make a positive contribution, if at all, only after fundamental change into a form that would probably be largely unrecognizable to most current practitioners.
For practical reasons of time and access to data, this study is restricted to only three of the five developing countries that participated in FCPI, and observations are drawn from only a limited number of the full range of modules.
See note 3 for more details.
In this paper, the term module is used to refer to each of the four units, whose delivery would then be repeated in a series of several courses. Module therefore refers primarily to the standard content of each unit, which will be common to the distinct event of each course.
In total across the five countries and all four modules, over 100 courses have been delivered, with over 2000 participants.
UNEP specifically encourages the use of the FCPI materials by others, without restriction, as a means of maximizing their dissemination; there is no intellectual property constraint on this. The FCPI training materials (e.g. UNEP, Citation2002) are available via http://www.financingcp.org/training/training.html#cont.
The term output-based is used here in the sense in which it is defined earlier in this paper. In contrast, D'Andrea uses the term outcome to refer to output as defined in this paper and does not identify a category equivalent to this paper's outcomes.
This was superfluous in Zimbabwe since the case study included in the generic materials had itself originally been based on a Zimbabwean company.
In Zimbabwe where the programme was marketed particularly vigorously through the media and demand was high, the national representative was able to require that applicants should be selectively interviewed before they were accepted onto the courses.
The UK Government's EnviroWise programme ran a project on environmental management accounting (EnviroWise, Citation2002) based on this premise, aimed primarily at practising accountants as a way of influencing industry and in particular the small to medium-sized company sector, which they had previously found to be difficult to reach and influence through their usual channels.
In 2000, the UK Federation of Small Businesses [FSB] published the results (FSB, Citation2000) from a survey of 22 000 small businesses in the UK with collectively more than 360 000 employees. Ninety-seven per cent of respondents indicated that they sought business advice from accountants in preference to other potential sources of advice, such as trade associations or banks, and the highest levels of satisfaction were reported with advice provided by accountants.