The critical foundations of truly sustainable environmental auditing

This essay addresses the urgent need for transformative action in environmental governance and examines how environmental auditing can support diagnostic and transformative agency within social-ecological systems. This requires a radical conceptual reconfiguration of environmental audit. To this end, the essay advances five conceptual foundations for a more impactful and sustainable approach. These include: an overarching commitment to Earth system stability; transcending an organization-centric paradigm; repositioning environmental auditing as a first-order function that drives, rather than follows, accounting; leveraging diverse forms of accounts to generate diagnostic insights into what truly matters within social-ecological systems; and actively coordinating accountability processes. Collectively, these foundations reposition environmental audit as a dynamic practice for nurturing meaningful change in social-ecological systems.