Sustainability Accounting and Reporting: Fad or Trend？

• Sofia Petrov

  Author

The question of whether sustainability accounting and reporting represents a passing managerial fashion or a structural transformation of corporate disclosure has occupied the academic literature for over three decades. This paper revisits this debate in light of more than fifteen years of accumulated evidence, the proliferation of competing reporting frameworks, the entry of global standard-setters, and the recent wave of mandatory disclosure regulation. Drawing on a systematic review of the literature, the paper argues that SAR has decisively moved beyond the status of a fad. The convergence of investor demand, regulatory mandates (notably the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), and the institutionalisation of disclosure standards through the International Sustainability Standards Board collectively indicate that SAR has become a durable trend. Yet the trend is uneven, fragmented by competing materiality concepts, weakened by persistent critique of the triple bottom line rhetoric, and contested between those who see accounting as a pragmatic tool for management decision-making and those who view it as incapable of capturing ecological reality. The paper concludes that the directional trajectory is unmistakable, but its depth and rigour remain the principal battlegrounds of scholarship.

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