Green accounting practices for sustainable business growth: A systematic review and qualitative insights from industry professionals

Abstract

Green accounting serves a key role in environmental mainstreaming within corporate financial reporting, enhancing corporate sustainability and regulatory compliance. The study seeks to examine the role of green accounting towards environmentally sustainable business development by systematic literature review with a PRISMA strategy and qualitative insights from the focus group interview. A purposive sampling technique was employed to identify 20 business professionals from various industries to ensure a variety of views on green accounting adoption, challenges, and strategies. The qualitative data were analyzed with NVivo software to identify key themes and patterns of implementation experiences. The results indicate that green accounting helps in corporate transparency, resource efficiency, and environmental responsibility. However, adoption is frustrated by regulatory fragmentation, financial constraints, and inadequate technical skills. Despite the understanding by companies of the benefits of green accounting, issues in adopting it, such as complexity in compliance, stakeholder resistance, and high cost, are significant barriers. The study shows that stakeholders’ demands, particularly from investors and regulators, require companies to adopt green accounting, but policy guidelines, finance incentives, and technical support are required by companies to apply sustainability reporting effectively. In order to overcome these challenges, this research suggests harmonizing sustainability reporting frameworks, building capacity building programs, and utilizing online tools to simplify data collection and reporting mechanisms. The application of NVivo for the thematic analysis offered a richer understanding of industry views in favor of conducting sector-focused research and specific policy interventions. Future research should extend qualitative results by sectors and regions to develop actionable strategies for facilitating the successful incorporation of green accounting into business financial decision-making.