Lake Pedder: Accounting, environmental decision-making, nature and impression management

Abstract

This paper looks at the role of accounting in a major environmental infrastructural project, the flooding of Lake Pedder in Tasmania in the 1960s. This was a contentious political decision in which accounting information was important and decisive. The paper found that accounting was used selectively and creatively to legitimate decision-making supporting a cost-benefit calculus. Environmental considerations were rendered invisible, marginalised and excluded from the evaluation. Accounting was used as an impression management tool through selectivity, bias and enhancement. It provides a rare illustration of the limitations of accounting for an infrastructural environmental decision using a real life, in depth case study.

Keywords:

• Environmental decision-making
• Environmental externalities
• Impression management
• Lake Pedder

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank participants at the 15th Financial Reporting and Business Communication Conference, Bristol, July 2011, the 23rd International Congress on Social and Environmental Accounting Research (CSEAR), St Andrews, September 2011 and the 10th CSEAR Australasian Conference, Launceston, December 2011, for their helpful comments and suggestions. My thanks also to Claire Horner for her help collecting data. Finally, I would like to thank Glen Lehman and an anonymous reviewer. Tragically, Sue Hrasky died before this paper was accepted for publication and this paper is in her memory.

Notes

1 Olegas Truchanas was an environmental activist who died on the Gordon River, Tasmania trying to protect the Lake Pedder area.

2 Acknowledging the difficulties in establishing the feasibility of restoration in the short term, the Committee recommended a Commonwealth-funded moratorium on the development while investigations proceeded. It favoured an alternative funded scheme that would save Lake Pedder. This was rejected by the Tasmanian government and the scheme continued without alteration. Lake Pedder was lost.

3 We are grateful to Rob Gray for alerting us to the Churchman (1971) and Rahaman et al. (2004) cases.

4 Holmes Rolston (1985) identifies, in total, 11 types of non-economic value carried by wildlands. The witnesses to the enquiry broadly discussed eight of these (we combined intrinsic value and genetic diversity). They did not mention life support, scientific or cultural symbolisation.