Better resource management : a qualitative investigation of environmental management accounting practices used by the South African hotel sector

Abstract

The successful management of environmental impacts and environmental costs depends on the implementation of the appropriate Environmental Management Accounting practices (EMAPs). EMAPs provides a pragmatic response to the widely reported criticisms of conventional management accounting practices. This paper reports on the EMAPs evident from the hotel sector in South African, used in order to optimise of environmental costs. Purposive sampling was used to select the hotel group that met the discriminatory criterion. Considering that this study was exploratory in nature, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 respondents after having obtained saturation. Cross-case syntheses were used to analyse data after thematic coding was performed to categorise findings from hotels under investigation. The study found that the implementation EMAPs is limited in the South African hotel sector. This is due to the fact that the implementation of these practices is voluntary at this stage and there is no awareness by the hotels of the existing framework that they can use. Moreover, there is negligible pressure from the government for the hotels to see a need to reduce their environmental impacts. Results show that hotels focus on the allocation of environmental costs to activities with the aim of determining costs created and costs avoided by the hotels' operations. In addition, the investigated hotels have developed technologies such as BMS and GEPA, not only to allocate environmental costs to activities but also to trace and record flows of energy and water. Therefore, Environmental Cost Accounting (ECA) and Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA) are prominently used by the investigated hotels as EMAPs. These are used for the optimisation of environmental costs and to improve the environmental performance. However, the development and implementation of new technologies that complement EMAPs were found to be a challenge because of the shortage of skilled personnel and massive investments requirement for these to be implemented.