This paper is an attempt to contribute to the debate within the accounting literature as to the likely efficacy of environmental accounting. For purposes of exposition, one can simplify and point to two contrasting positions in the literature. The first suggests that organizations can and do change in substantive ways when they respond to the environmental agenda and that environmental accounting is part of the process of enabling these organizational changes. In contrast, the second position posits that organizations will not change in response to environmental demands. Rather, they will change the environmental agenda itself in order to ensure that organizational activities can carry on as before. These two positions are characterized as “organizational change" and “institutional appropriation". In this paper these competing perspectives are explored by drawing from a case study of a Spanish electricity utility.