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While one-third of Australians live outside major cities, there are ongoing challenges in providing accessible, sustainable, and appropriate primary health care services in rural and remote communities. The purpose of this paper is to explore a partnership approach to understanding and addressing complex primary health workforce issues in the western region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia.

The authors describe how a collaboration of five organisations worked together to engage a broader group of stakeholders and secure commitment and resources for a regional approach to address workforce challenges in Western NSW. A literature review and formal interviews with stakeholders gathered knowledge, identified issues and informed the overarching approach, including the development of the Western NSW Partnership Model and Primary Health Workforce Planning Framework. A stakeholder forum tested the proposed approach and gained endorsement for a collaborative priority action plan.

The Western NSW Partnership Model successfully engaged regional stakeholders and guided the development of a collaborative approach to building a sustainable primary health workforce for the future.

Given the scarcity of literature about effective partnerships approaches to address rural health workforce challenges, this paper contributes to an understanding of how to build sustainable partnerships to positively impact on the rural health workforce. This approach is replicable and potentially valuable elsewhere in NSW, other parts of Australia and internationally.

William R. Freudenburg conceived “the double diversion” as the simultaneous process of diverting environmental resources or rights shared by all to a small group of social actors, which was made possible by a second diversion – the acceptance of the taken-for-granted assumption that environmental harms benefit the common good. In doing so, Freudenburg was among the first to note the importance of looking at not only the distribution of environmental harms but also environmental privileges. In this chapter, we extend the conceptualization of the double diversion to include an instance where rather than framing environmental harm as being a public good, environmental action is framed as benefiting the public writ large, while larger issues of environmental injustice are ignored. In particular, we look at the disproportionate distribution of the urban tree canopy in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the framing of the mitigation of the environmental threat of the Asian Longhorned Beetle as a problem for the commons. Through an analysis of media, we demonstrate that organizations and social actors who have tried to address the effects of this particular ecological threat have nonetheless ignored previous disproportionalities in the environment–society relationship.

This article explores and contrasts the views of two influential research projects within the social and environmental accounting space. Both projects advocate for sustainability. The first here referred to as the Critical Social and Environmental Accounting Project (CSEAP), was developed and championed by Rob Gray and calls for immediate radical structural change. The second one is called the Pragmatic Sustainability Management Accounting Project (PSMAP), championed by Stefan Schaltegger, and advocates for an entrepreneurial process of creating radical solutions in joint stakeholder collaboration over time.

The paper is the culmination of a decade-long debate between Gray and Schaltegger as advocates of CSEAP and PSMAP, respectively. Specifically, the paper explores the differences and agreements between CSEAP and PSMAP on whether and how companies should pursue sustainability and the role of accounting in these efforts. The paper focusses on critical issues that exemplify the tension in their views: general goals, the role of structure and agency and how to creating change and transformation.

The article contrasts CSEAP's uncompromising antagonising approach to accountability and fundamental systemic change with PSMAP's pragmatic approach to sustainability accounting with its management and entrepreneurship-orientated approach to change and unwavering support for transformative managers on the front lines. Despite their apparent differences, the paper also outlines areas of agreement between these two positions and how accounting and sustainability can move forward.

The debate tries to reconcile language and conceptional differences in the social and environmental accounting (SEA) and sustainability management accounting (SMA) communities to reduce confusion in the research space over what sustainability is for organisations and what role accounting plays in this. The authors hope that the tension between the different positions outlined in this paper generates new insights and positions on the topic.

While the two views explored in this paper are primarily incompatible, each generates implications for practice, research and education. Debates like this are crucial to moving from discursive disagreement to creating a tolerant and robust foundation for moving forward and achieving much-needed sustainable transitions in the economy and society.

The authors offer shared understandings, points of continuing disagreement and alternative views on the nature of sustainability. The debate forges a bridge of understanding where both sides can learn from each other.