Abstract:
As of today, the environmental management maturity (EMM) and environmental management
accounting (EMA) literature has established itself in its own right. Despite the obvious connection
between these two fields of study, they have evolved along parallel paths with limited inter
communication. This paper therefore aims to identify the use of EMA in different stages of EMM
with a view to establishing a connection between these two fields. Data for this study was collected
by identifying nine case organizations each from three different EMM stages. Accordingly,
interviews, site visits and document analyses were used to collect data, which was analysed based
on the environmental domain uses and functional applications of EMA in each EMM stage. The
preliminary analyses of these selected organizations suggest that as the EMM level of increases,
organizations depict a higher level of functional use of EMA for control and stewardship purposes
despite the limited use of EMA for decision- making purposes. From the perspective of an
environmental domain, the study finds that the use of integrative EMA tools is considerably low
even in organizations with higher levels of EMM. These preliminary findings suggest that the use
of EMA (or broadly, accounting) is still limited in the corporate environmental management. The
study discusses some of the implications for theory and practice.
