Water Accounting in Economia Aziendale

In response to calls for more in depth exploration of the state and prospect of research on accounting for sustainability, this paper presents an extensive review of the “accounting for water” literature to examine how research on these issues has evolved over time in the Accounting, Management and Organisation fields. In the first part, we provide a conceptual and theoretical background of the issues investigated. The second part introduces the methodology, which was adopted. Our analysis shows that the publication on ‘accounting for water’ developed and evolved through three stages, namely: i) the beginning era (1970s-1989s), where ‘water-issues’ started to appear as a novel topic of research. ii) The diffusion era (1990s – 2007) when ‘water-issues’ gradually became a recognizable research topic; and iii) the proliferation era (2007–2017) where research on ‘water-issues’ became an established and consolidated area of investigation in the fields of Accounting, Management and Organisation.