The Pacific region

In this chapter, we provide a snapshot of published works relating to environmental accounting and reporting issues to demonstrate the past, present and potential future of the discipline in the Pacific region. We categorise our review into a simplified conceptual framework that recognises Indigenous perspectives and mainstream perspectives which can conflict, coerce or complement one another. We argue that sustainability, in its relation to social and environmental issues, has been defined in this mainstream perspective, and distributed to the Indigenous perspective from above, where this concept has existed in different forms across different cultures in our region since time immemorial. We therefore advocate future research which embraces Indigenous perspectives from below to confront these global issues as an empowering approach rather than a deficit or colonial approach. Although social and environmental concerns are devastating our region today, there are solutions emerging from these – often marginalised – perspectives, which imagine alternative futures. While the functionality of this chapter is to provide an overview of existing social and environmental accounting research in the Pacific region, we hope that it will also enable future researchers to engage with these solutions in respectful and generative ways so that we can imagine and create these alternative futures together.