The Sustainability Balanced Scorecard as a Framework to Link Environmental Management Accounting with Strategic Management

As an information management approach, environmental management accounting (EMA) focuses mainly on operational issues such as environmental costs and revenues. Many environmental issues (such as, for example, whether to introduce green products, or when to change the production technology to a more eco-efficient process) can, however, be of far-reaching strategic importance for a company. An important question for the relevance of EMA is therefore how it can be linked with corporate environmental strategy.The Balanced Scorecard has emerged and has been discussed as a modern approach to translate strategy into action and thus to link strategy with the operational level of management activities. This is why the development of a sustainability balanced scorecard is discussed here for profit-oriented companies. The proposed approach has been developed by the Centre for Sustainability Management, Lueneburg, Germany, in a two-year research program in co-operation with partners from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Insead, Fontainebleau, France, and the approach which is discussed has been tested in practice with six large German and Swiss companies (Schaltegger and Dyllick 2002).After a brief discussion of the different possible forms of a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard, the paper takes a closer look at the process and steps of formulating a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard for a business unit. Before doing so, the Balanced Scorecard and its suitability for sustainability management will be outlined in brief.