A critical review of environmental accounting frameworks: Toward an operational harmonisation agenda

Environmental Accounting Frameworks (EAFs) have expanded rapidly across public policy, corporate reporting, and sustainability governance, reflecting growing demand for integrating environmental information into decision making. Despite substantial conceptual development and increasing institutional uptake, existing research offers limited insight into how these frameworks are operationalised in practice or how they can interoperate across institutional domains. As a result, environmental accounting continues to exhibit limited operational coherence and weak interoperability, constraining comparability, policy integration, and the effective reuse of environmental accounts. Addressing this gap, this article provides a systematic and empirically validated review of EAFs, with a specific focus on operationalisation and interoperability. The study pursues four objectives: (i) to map and categorise EAFs with demonstrable institutional relevance; (ii) to define and validate criteria for assessing their operational maturity; (iii) to identify structural and methodological barriers limiting implementation and cross framework interoperability; and (iv) to explore pathways for advancing an agenda of operational harmonisation. Methodologically, the study adopts a triangulated mixed methods design combining systematic literature and institutional review, qualitative comparative analysis, and structured expert validation. Triangulation integrates documentary evidence, structured analytical comparison, and expert judgement drawn from both academic and applied domains, strengthening methodological robustness and limiting disciplinary bias. The article contributes to environmental accounting scholarship by shifting attention from conceptual proliferation toward operational integration. For policymakers and statistical authorities, it provides guidance for aligning environmental accounts across governance levels. For standard setting bodies and corporate reporting actors, it identifies actionable pathways to enhance data interoperability and reporting coherence. For researchers, it offers a validated analytical framework to support more operationally grounded and policy relevant environmental accounting research.