Le contrôle de gestion environnemental. État des lieux, état de l'art

If existing definitions for management control and organizational control have been widely discussed in the existing literature, what can be said of environmental management control, or eco-control, which is today developed in some organizations as a response to sustainable development issues? Is it possible, as of today, to identify a conceptual framework for an emerging, yet fragmented, practice, and to position existing tools within this framework? This article aims at providing answers to this question, based on a review of existing research and development efforts. This review starts with a survey of conceptual and prescriptive academic contributions which attempt to define environmental accounting and management control, so as to identify underlying conceptual frameworks. We then prolong this work with a review of the literature on tools, so as to survey and inventory existing ones. Based on this inventory we select some of our own projects, which consisted in developing environmental accounting tools. We analyze the characteristics of these tools so as to identify in what way they broaden the perimeter of traditional management control and how they relate to the conceptual frameworks we identified for environmental management control.