Intellectual capital for green accounting in agribusiness

Abstract

Agribusiness organizations have gained an understanding of the need to promote environmentally friendly actions for the present and the future. Green accounting (GA) or environmental accounting is a new branch of accounting that attempts to factor costs related to the environment into the financial results of various operations. The concept of intellectual capital (IC) describes all the resources or capital that determines an organization’s value and competitiveness. The implementation of GA principles in an agribusiness organization is a cross-disciplinary work that entails sustainability, accounting, and other fields of research. Thus, competent farmers (human capital), good relationships with stakeholders (relational capital), structural changes (organizational capital), and innovativeness (innovation capital) all of which are concepts of IC are needed for the implementation of environmental sustainability policies and procedures within an organization. This conceptual paper explores key success factors for the GA from the IC perspective. We proposed that, for different reasons and logic, the human, customer, organizational, innovation, and process capitals all play roles as key success factors for good implementation of GA in agribusiness.