Call for Papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2026. London.
Accounting for nature, or holding nature to account? Critical geographies of environmental accounting
Mark Usher and Joe Blakey (The University of Manchester)
This session stages a critical exploration of the links between geography and questions of environmental accounting. Over the last two decades, the environment has not only been increasingly taken into account – with its social and economic benefits measured, quantified, valued and priced – but also, more recently, held to account. While the former is often presented as a route to environmental improvement, it warrants scrutiny: environmental accounting is invariably partial, shaped by power relations, and uneven in its effects. The latter development is more troubling. As nature is ledgered and administered like any other asset, it becomes fungible, replaceable even, through accounting logics. This session will explore the Janus-faced nature of environmental accounting, where, on the one hand, accounting practices enable regimes of governance and place nature on the ‘public balance sheet’, on the other, they serve to demand a justification for nature’s existence via economic reasoning.
Carbon accounting brought something as nebulous as entities’ relations with the atmosphere onto the books, to assume (selective) carbon accountability, benchmark and rank progress, enable carbon markets and offsetting practices, and forecast decarbonisation pathways of benefit or minimal detriment to ‘business as usual’. Similarly, nature accounts, forming the basis of natural capital, biodiversity net gain, and the restoration economy, have further extended ‘stock-taking’ financial logics into the environmental domain. Governments, business, NGOs, and universities have largely acquiesced to the need for cost-benefit analyses in environmental decision-making, to the common sense of holding nature itself to account. The influence of economists, accountants, financial consultants and investors has significantly grown as a result, challenging that of ecologists and conservation bodies, at the fuzzy intersection of science, politics and economics.
Beyond professionals, everyone can provide their own account of ‘the environment’. But amidst its popular conflation with economic accounting, it is often reserved as a practice for experts and technocratic management, delimiting who gets to speak for the environment. In response, geographers have sought to foreground the potential of overlooked perspectives, including radical, decolonial, artistic, and activist backgrounds. This session invites contributions to contemplate and discuss the threats, limits and affordances of balance sheet nature.
Key themes for consideration might include, but are not limited to:
- The growing influence of accounting professionals and expertise in environmental policy and governance
- Accounting and governance innovation, new public management, and post-democracy
- Connections between environmental accounting and neoliberalism, austerity and public sector reform
- The role of metrics and standards in governing ‘at a distance’ and silencing or shadowing other ways of knowing social and environmental phenomena
- How accounting principles and protocols are reshaping everyday norms, values, practices, affects, and subjectivities in the environment sector
- The role of environmental accounting in (de)legitimising certain forms of environmental (in)action
- How accounting can be used as a technology of de- or re-politicisation
- Critical takes on accounting across diverse empirical terrains such as natural capital and carbon accounting
- The uneven geographies of entitlements and responsibilities that modes of accounting might sustain
- The links between geography, political ecology, STS, valuation and critical accounting studies, amongst others, and the field of Social and Environmental Accounting (SEA)
- Methodological approaches to studying environmental accounting
- How accounting is implicated in processes of economisation, quantification, assetisation and financialisation in/of the environment sector
- The role of accounting in ‘knowing’ metabolic flows and stocks
- The role of the non-human in relation to accounting practice
We welcome traditional paper presentations. All contributions should be around 10 minutes to leave time for questions.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words by the end of Friday 27th February to mark.usher@manchester.ac.uk and joe.blakey@manchester.ac.uk