Proceedings

sustainable performance can represent a “3 in 1” solution for the economic, social and
environmental issues. The entities oriented towards green strategies must comply in
the future with mandatory regulations for each activity, and managers’ plans will be
targeted to sustainable budgets models. This reflects that the budgetary annual
approach may undermine the budgetary performance, leading to incorrect allocation
and inefficient use of resources and also to fiscal instability. In the late 1980s and the
beginning of 1990, many countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) have launched reforms in the public sector which included
new budgetary approaches to significantly reduce large fiscal deficits. Gradually, they
abandoned the traditional budgeting, line - element, and applied a sustainable topdown
(vertical) budgetary model. This modern approach of public finance
management seeks to structure the budget around large programs, which are defined
along the goals of governmental policy and they are linked to specific outcomes in
order to integrate policy, planning and annual budgets. (Petkova, 2009). The
transition, from initiation to performance-oriented budgeting, is extremely difficult
because appropriate approaches are needed for the political and institutional contexts
within the Ministry of Finance and the sectoral ministries. It also means that the
budgets are structured on a program with very stable allocations from one year to
another, replacing the budgets based on a traditional line, where the sectors used to
forecast the current budget on the one of the previous year, plus a small increase. In
other words: "the priorities of the policy determine the funding and not vice versa"
(Holmes & Evans, 2003). By planning their activities, managers learn to anticipate
potential problems and how they can be avoided. Therefore, representatives of
environmental ministries and other relevant governmental agencies having
responsibilities for managing environmental and natural resources, struggle to
introduce into the medium-term budgets this useful analysis for green strategies.
However, the cross - sectoral nature of many environmental problems requires a
specific action, coordinated by a wide range of public sector institutions and
represents a major challenge. It is remarkable that countries that have successfully
introduced such budgeting models, which also included social and environmental
programs, have started from a strong base in terms of public sector capacity and
public finance management, and have done so for a certain number of years.
Exploring a wider area of decision making situations of public and private entities in
the developed countries involves a special focus on accounting informing needs of
stakeholders (Bebbington et al., 2007). Recent research refer to numerous motivations
regarding the social and environmental reporting (O'Dwyer et al., 2005, Cormier et
al., 2005, Solomon & Lewis, 2002). Cormier et al. (2005) propose that sustainable
reporting of potential costs should be understood in the context of benefits for the
humankind. Hassel et al. (2005) examined the relevance of environmental
performance and finds that investors do not appreciate the true value of this
performance increase as a result of environmental protection activities in terms of
overall green performance. Sustainable reporting is often known as the Triple Bottom
Line Reporting (TBL) and forms the basis of shares within companies that lead to
environmental performance and technological development together with social
contribution. In practice, public and private agencies of environmental management
use environmental indicators to summarize and assess the ecological processes
(environmental performance, the allocation of restoration efforts and to establish the
benchmarks of social and environmental criteria). Yale Center for Environmental Law
and Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information
Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University in collaboration with the World Economic
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