Understanding relationships between public policies, accounting and sustainability in the ecosystem of airspace networks

This study investigates the role of public policies and accounting in the process of setting up commercial satellites, drones and high resolution cameras in orbits and tasking them to collect data of relevance for a new market of sustainable products (Alewine, 2020; Tucker et al., 2020). The research question is how do airspace policies and data emerge into an accounting shaped market for sustainable products? The study uses archetype theory (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993; Kirkpatrick & Ackroyd, 2003) as sensitive devise to conceptualize the market of sustainable products in which airspace policies and data, and inter-organizational accounting mechanisms play influential roles (Quintana, 2017; Newman & Williamson, 2018).

Empirical data came from two ministries, one funding organization and one space organization based in Finland. Findings show the instrumental role accounting and well-motivated governmental policies in developing air space technologies capable to deliver on-demand and timely data to the market of sustainable products, such as carbon market. The study highlights the relevance of combining well focused public policies with accounting, management, marketing and information technologies to innovate new market avenues that did not exist anywhere before. Hence, in addition to contributing to recent studies in this emerging field (Alewine, 2020; Davidian, 2021) this study suggests a number of new inter-disciplinary research areas that merit efforts in public sector accounting research.