Economic value + environmental value + social value = ?
by Mei Lim
Interdisciplinary Environmental Review (IER), Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004

Abstract: In today's business world, the successful application of performance measurement has been one of the hallmarks of leading-edge organisations. Performance measurement is implemented to gain insight into, and make judgments about, an organisation and the effectiveness and efficiency of its programs. An important issue for organisations is that their economic activity may have negative impacts on society and the environment. Therefore, increasing emphasis is being given to a corporate measurement system, Triple Bottom Line (TBL), which integrates economic value, environmental value and social value to help measure progress towards achieving sustainability. There are three bottom lines that represent economic, social and environmental performance. As social performance depends on economic performance and economic performance depends on the global ecosystem, the three bottom lines are interlinked to form an ultimate bottom line. TBL is a concept that reports on the extent to which an organisation has helped society achieve the three interlinked goals of economic prosperity, environmental protection and social equity. This paper discusses the TBL approach developed by John Elkington in an attempt to identify an assessment methodology for organizational processes. It seeks to offer an insight into TBL, outlines the key features of the concept and some issues that must be addressed in its implementation for process improvement purposes. This paper suggests that taking the ''three bottom lines'' view across a range of performance measures, can best access the performance of an organisation, however, with the absence of international standards and regulation and absence of consistency in measurement units, it is meaningless in which triple bottom line advocates can claim there is a social bottom and environmental bottom line.

Online publication date: Mon, 13-May-2013

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