The papers in this special issue include a selection of articles presented at the 2015, CSEAR conference in Brazil. This special issue is aimed at celebrating the research that Brazilian social and environmental accounting researchers have been undertaking for some time. As far as we know this is the first special issue compiled for this purpose.
The first paper in this special issue by Barbara de Lima Voss, David Bernard Carter, and Bruno Meirelles Salotti in “Hegemonies, Politics and the Brazilian Academy in Social and Environmental Accounting: A Post-Structural Note” undertakes a comprehensive review of the Brazilian research on social and environmental accounting (SEA). The paper highlights the hegemony of business case thinking and the dominance of the economic imperative in Brazilian SEA research. Adopting a post-structural perspective that reflects Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, a total of 352 articles are analyzed that reflect the Brazilian literature on SEA.
In “An Analysis of the Adherence to GRI for Disclosing Information on Social Action and Sustainability Concerns,” Vicente Lima Crisóstomo, Priscila de Azevedo Prudêncio, and Hyane Correia Forte investigate the degree of adherence to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) by organizations from all over the world, as well as the quality of CSR reports using institutional and legitimacy theoretical frameworks. The sample consists of annual data from all organizations that have disclosed sustainability reports through GRI since its first year, 1999, until 2013. By means of a set of chi-squared tests, they evaluate whether organizational attributes are associated with the quality of organizations’ CSR reporting. They conclude that the legal and institutional environment, organization size, and type of organization have an influence on the use of GRI as a means to report organizations’ CSR. These variables have also influenced the quality of information of organizations’ GRI reports.
Patrícia Lacerda de Carvalho and Aldo Leonardo Cunha Callado compare the financial stock performance of Brazilian companies that participate in the Carbon Efficient Index with those that participate only in market-wide indices of the São Paulo Stock Exchange (BM&FBovespa) in “Financial Performance of Stocks of Companies Participating in the Carbon Efficient Index (ICO2).” To draw up a comprehensive picture of the Brazilian stock market, the sample is comprised of four BM&FBovespa indices, namely, ICO2, the Bovespa Index (IBOV), Brazil 100 Index (IBrX100), and Brazil 50 Index (IBrX50). The ICO2 is the only sustainability index. They reveal that sustainable enterprises consider not only financial results but also intrinsic environmental and social benefits.
Complementing the previous study, in “Performance of Sustainability and Negotiability Indexes in the Brazilian Stock Market,” Patrícia Lacerda de Carvalho and Orleans Silva Martins examine and compare the stock returns of the sustainability index member companies with the returns of companies out of these indexes. All information from two indexes on sustainability and social responsibility of the Brazilian stock market were used in the study. The review period was 2005–2014. They infer that the sustainability indexes do not indicate higher returns although Brazilian companies with sustainable practices appear to be concerned with economic performance and social, cultural, and environmental issues.
Finally, José Venâncio Ferreira Neto, Sônia Maria da Silva Gomes, Adriano Leal Bruni and José Maria Dias Filho in “Do Environmental Disasters Impact on the Volume of Socio-environmental Investment and Disclosure of Brazilian Companies?” investigate the impact of environmental disasters on the volume of disclosure and investments of Brazilian companies in the period 1997–2012. The authors have shown that the companies reported a higher volume of socio-environmental disclosure in the two years after the occurrence of the accidents.
We hope that the contributions contained within this special issue will stimulate further reflections and discussions on the topics presented and discussed by the authors. Finally, we would like to thank all authors for submitting their papers and their willingness to engage with the review process. We would also like to thank the reviewers of this special issue for their time and efforts against a rather tight time frame.