Résumé
The impacts caused by human activities on ecosystems are always the result of a complex combination of negative pressures and positive contributions coming from a multiplicity of actors and sectors. The effects of each actor’s actions interact, combine, sum-up or cancel-out each other, having synergistic or antagonist results on the final state of a given environmental concern. Thus, result-oriented environmental management is necessarily a collective affaire, and any organisation interested in improving the ecological state of an ecosystem will sooner or later be forced to operate within collective arrangements. Our work continues the “ecosystem-centred accounting” research agenda, which aims to prioritize this unavoidable collective dimension of environmental management through the development of accounting systems that place the ecosystem per se as the pertinent accounting entity (Feger et al., 2019; Feger and Mermet, 2017). Here, we are specifically interested in the “Ecosystem-centred accounting framework” (ECAF), a conceptual accounting architecture that aims to bring together all relevant types of accounts that need to be considered and linked to each other to support environmental collective action. In this study, we use a research-intervention approach to test the potential of ECAF to support a strategic environmental actor in the establishment of collective arrangements and engagements in order to achieve enhanced environmental results. First, we identify how our partner organization (the Tour du Valat - a French institute for wetlands’ research and conservation), already uses different types of information systems and metrics in real-world environmental-management situations. Secondly, we compare these information systems in place to the general architecture of our framework. As a first result, we show ECAF’s adherence to the studied cases. We then discuss the framework’s ability to enrich stakeholders’ discussions on addressing their management challenges. We finally open-up the discussion on the framework’s potential for the design of new collective accounting systems.