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This study explores accounting practice in an Indigenous organization. This organization is embedded within a rural Aboriginal community in the country currently known as Australia. In doing so, this study illustrates the intertwining of accounting practice, practitioners, organizations and social/cultural context, while recognizing that the cultural embeddedness of accounting is not uniform.

Empirical materials were collected as part of a qualitative field study with an Indigenous organization. Specific methods include interviews, informal conversations, documentary reviews and participant observations. These materials were analysed through a Bourdieusian perspective.

By working with Indigenous Peoples on the ground, rather than relying on secondary materials, this study highlights how the values of a community challenge and reorient accounting practice towards community aspirations. This study illustrates how fields beyond the organization influence accounting practice, including in budgeting and assurance.

Exploring Indigenous practices of accounting maintains Indigenous agency and opens up space for alternative understandings and practices of accounting. By illustrating how a community can influence the accounting practice of an organization, this study has implications for wider understandings of the cultural embeddedness of mainstream accounting and possible alternatives.

The study uses the case of an online-mediated barter economy that proliferated during the COVID-19 crisis to highlight Indigenous notions of barter, trade and exchange.

A netnographic approach was employed which involved collecting online posts and comments which were stored and analysed in NVivo. This was supplemented with field notes and reflections from authors with an intimate knowledge of the context. These were analysed thematically. The overall methodology is inspired by decolonising methodologies that seek to restore the agency of Indigenous Peoples in research towards self-determination.

Findings suggest that during and beyond the crisis, social media (a new means) is being used to facilitate barter and determinations of/accounting for value within. This is being done through constant appeals to, and adaptation of, tradition (old ways). Indigenous accounting is therefore best understood as so through Indigenous accountability values and practices.

This paper propose a re-orientation of accounting for barter research that incorporates recent debates between the disciplines of economics and anthropology on the nature of barter, debt and exchange. The authors also propose a re-imagining of accounting and accountability relations based on Indigenous values within an emerging online barter system in Fiji during COVID-19 as “old ways and new means” to privilege Indigenous agency and overcome excessive essentialism.

This paper explores the role of accounting and accountability techniques in contributing to Australia’s border industrial complex.

We use the political thought of Behrouz Boochani to explore the role that accounting techniques play at the micro and macro level of his dialectic of alienation and freedom. Firstly, we explore the accounting and accountability techniques detailed in Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountain, which gives an account of his life in Manus Prison, and the accounting techniques he experienced. Secondly, we explore the discourse of alienation created within the annual reporting of the Australian Federal Government regarding the border industrial complex.

We argue that the border industrial complex requires the alienation of asylum seekers from their own humanity for capital accumulation, and that accounting and accountability techniques facilitate this form of alienation. These techniques include inventorying, logging and queuing at the micro level within Manus Prison. This alienates those trapped in the system from one another and themselves. Techniques also include annual reporting at a macro level which alienates those trapped in the system from the (White) “Australian Community”. However, these techniques are resisted at every point by assertions of freedom.

We illustrate the role of accounting in accumulation by alienation, where the unfreedom of incarcerated asylum seekers is a site of profit for vested interests. But also that this alienation is resisted at every point by refusals of alienation as assertions of freedom. Thus, this study contributes to the accounting literature by drawing from theories of alienation, and putting forward the dialectic of alienation and freedom articulated by Boochani and collaborators.

This paper explores diverse practices of the giving and demanding of democratic accountability within a case of conflict around deep-sea petroleum exploration in Aotearoa New Zealand. These practices include submissions and consultations, partnership between Indigenous Peoples and a settler-colonial government and dissensus. These are theorised through the political thought of Jacques Rancière.

A single case study approach is employed that seeks to particularise and draws on interview, documentary and media materials.

By examining a case of conflict, the authors find that as opportunities for participation in democratic accountability processes are eroded, political dissensus emerges to demand parts in the accountability process. Dissensus creates counter forums within a wider understanding of democratic accountability. In this case, individuals and organisations move between police (where hierarchy counts those with a part) and politics (exercised when this hierarchy is disrupted by dissensus) to demand parts as police logics become more and less democratic. These parts are then utilised towards particular interests, but in this case to also create additional parts for those with none.

This study privileges demands for accountability through dissensus as fundamental to democratic accountability, rather than just account giving and receiving. That is, who is or who is not included – who has a stake or a part – is crucial in a broader understanding of democratic accountability. This provides democratic accountability with a radical potential for creating change. The study also advances thinking on democratic accountability by drawing from Indigenous perspectives and experiences in a settler-colonial context.

This paper introduces the second part of a AAAJ special issue on accounting, accountability and management during the COVID-19 emergency. The authors analyse the themes that emerge from the second part of the special issue, which allows us to identify the diverse accounting and accountability practices across different geographical and organisational contexts. The authors also provide an overall picture of the contributions of the special issue, with insights into avenues of future research.

Building on the first part of the AAAJ special issue, the paper draws together and identifies additional emerging themes related to research into the COVID-19 pandemic and how it impacts accounting, accountability and management practices. The authors reflect on the contributions of the special issue to the interdisciplinary accounting research project.

The authors identify two macro-themes and outline their contributions to the accounting literature. The first deals with the changes and dangers of accounting and accountability practices during the pandemic. The second considers accountability practices in a broader sense, including reporting, disclosure and rhetorical practices in the management of COVID-19.

The paper shows the pervasive role of accounting and accountability in the unprecedented and indiscriminate health crisis of COVID-19. It highlights the important role of special issues in producing timely research that responds to unfolding events.

This paper contributes to current debates on the roles of accounting and accountability during COVID-19 by drawing together the themes of the special issue and identifying future interdisciplinary accounting research on the pandemic's aftermath.

Recognition that not every climate adaptation policy is a good one has shifted attention to new tools and methods to measure the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation policies. This study aims to propose and apply and applies an innovative adaptation policy assessment framework to identify the extent to which climate adaptation policies in Vietnam exhibit conditions that are likely to ensure a sufficient, credible and effective adaptation.

In total, 21 conditions, categorized under five normative principles and covering critical issue areas in adaptation domain, form the climate adaptation policy assessment framework. The principles were double-checked and tested in case studies through observations and analyses of policy documents to ensure that each condition should be distinct and not overlapping across principles. To see if the principles and attendant conditions were able to capture all relevant aspects of adaptation, the authors used structured expert judgment. In total, 39 policy documents pertaining to climate change adaptation were selected for qualitative document analysis. In-depth interviews with local officials and experts were conducted to address data gaps.

The study reveals major weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation policies in Vietnam since several critical conditions were underrepresented. These results shed new light on why some adaptation policies falter or are posing adverse impacts. The findings suggest that a sound policy assessment framework can provide evidence on what effective adaptation policy looks like and how it can be enabled. The framework for climate adaptation policy assessment in this study can be easily adjusted and used for different socio-environmental contexts in which new conditions for policy assessment might emerge.

The findings show underlying weaknesses constituting a reasonably worrisome picture of the adaptation regime in Vietnam. In the absence of mechanisms and measures for accountability and transparency in policy processes, adaptation in Vietnam appears more likely to be prone to maladaptation and corruption. While solving these problems will not be easy for Vietnam, the government needs to evaluate whether the short-term gains in sustaining the existing adaptation policies really make progress and serve its long-term climate-adaptive development goals.

Although interpretations of adaptation effectiveness may be very divergent in different normative views on adaptation outcomes, the authors argue that a common, agreed-upon effectiveness can be reached if it is clearly defined and measurable in adaptation policies. Thus, the climate adaptation policy assessment framework proposed in this study is critical for policymakers, practitioners, donors and stakeholders dealing with adaptation to better understand the weaknesses in policymaking processes, pinpoint priority areas of action and timely prevent or prepare for possible adverse impacts of policies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative’s (NEITI) ineffectiveness in delivering public accountability to Nigerian citizens. Although this failure is recognised in prior literature, the authors contend that NEITI’s role is obscured by one-sided links to external factors.

The conceptual framework presented in this study is built around Dillard and Vinnari’s (2019) distinction between different accountability systems and Brown and Dillard’s (2020) complimentary insights on the technologies of hubris and humility. The analytical framework draws from Grant and Keohane’s (2005) modes of accountability, which the authors use to articulate conflicting accountability demands (to-whom and for-what) of NEITI’s operating relationships. Combined, the authors analyse official documents, media, reports and interview responses from members of NEITI’s National Stakeholders Working Group.

This study surfaces a variety of intersecting interests across NEITI’s operational relationships. Some of these interests are mutually beneficial like that of Donors and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Others run counter to each other, such as NEITI’s relationship to the Presidency which illustrates a key source of NEITI’s ineffectiveness. In discussing these interests, the authors articulate their connection to NEITI’s design as an accountability system and its embedded limitations.

The authors provide incremental understanding of prior insight regarding NEITI’s ineffectiveness by drawing attention to its fundamental design as an accountability system and its failure to deliver public accountability. To illuminate these failures, the authors also map NEITI’s competing accountability demands – the nexus of accountability – to demonstrate the complex socio-political reality within which NEITI is expected to operate. The authors posit that NEITI’s ineffectiveness has as much to do with NEITI itself, as it does with external factors like the quality of information disclosed and the unique Nigerian context.

ANYONE who might have looked in at one of the windows of the “pavilion” at Churchill College in Cambridge in the late evening of September 11th, 1967, would have witnessed a rather remarkable event—a group of British and Scandinavian librarians performing with great sincerity a stirring musical interpretation of “Bobby Bingo”, using a variety of instruments ranging from potato pots and wine glasses to combs and human voices.

A dinner was held at the Café Royal on Tuesday, January 10th to celebrate the completion of forty years' existence by the British Food Journal and the British Analytical Control. A number of eminent people were present, and complimentary references were made to the invaluable services which the Journal and the Control had rendered in assisting in the suppression of adulteration and in giving authentic indication of genuineness.