Environmental audits in local government: a useful means to progress in sustainable development

Criticisms have been made about the proliferation of ’audits’ in non‐financial contexts and in particular about environmental audits with concerns for a lack of objectivity and their encouragement of (non)‐professional expertise (Power 1991, 1994). Much of this criticism is rooted in accounting meanings of audit and usually drawn from experiences in the private sector. Using a longitudinal study of environmental audits in UK local authorities, this paper investigates the potential of environmental audits to be socially useful in their roles of ’enabler’ and ’evalutor’ as local goverment responds to pressures from central goverment to make progress towards sustainable development.