The nexus between non-governmental organisations involved in conservation and profit-seeking state-owned enterprises: A potential alternative credibility enhancing mechanism for biodiversity disclosures?

Abstract

Responding to calls to incorporate biodiversity matters into accounting research, we attempt to provide a balance by moving away from the conventional focus on the reporting of biodiversity impacts and activities by public and private sector organisations, by focusing on how non-governmental organisations active in the conservation space (CNGOs), interact with the public sector. In particular, we confine our study to explaining how South African state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and CNGOs active in South Africa, report on their collaboration engagements. To explain the engagements between SOEs and CNGOs, we use their publicly available reports (annual/integrated) to explore the extent which these entities interact and collaborate. However, although several CNGOs operate in South Africa, we documented little evidence of formalised engagements between these SOEs and CNGOs, with Eskom being the notable exception. Notwithstanding the observed scant formalised reporting on engagements, we suggest that the reporting of CNGOs engagements could be harnessed to indirectly serve as alternative credibility enhancing mechanisms. In this way, it could contribute by attesting to the veracity of organisational biodiversity disclosures, and may provide a basis to hold these organisations to account for their contribution to environmental conservation, or degradation. In this context, we conclude by calling for a research agenda to investigate the relationship between CNGOs and their funding organisations, irrespective of whether they operate in the public or private sectors, as well as the potential of CNGOs to serve as advocacy and activism agents, thereby improving organisational biodiversity accountability.