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This research seeks to explain how a national government becomes capable of constructing an account of its biodiversity performance that is aimed at enabling formulation of policy in pursuit of SDG 15: Life on Land.

The research examines a case study of the construction of the UK government's annual biodiversity report. The case is analysed to explain the process of framing a space in which the SDG-15 challenge of halting biodiversity loss is rendered calculable, such that the government can see and understand its own performance in relation to this challenge.

The construction of UK government's annual biodiversity report relies upon data collected through non-governmental conservation efforts, statistical expertise of a small project group within the government and a governmental structure that drives ongoing evolution of the indicators as actors strive to make these useful for policy formulation.

The analysis problematises the SDG approach to accounting for sustainable development, whereby performance indicators have been centrally agreed and universally imposed upon all signatory governments. The analysis suggests that capacity-building efforts for national governments may need to be broader than that envisaged by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how proponents of biodiversity offsetting have sought to produce an ecologically defensible mechanism for reconciling economic development and biodiversity conservation.

The paper analyses a case study biodiversity offsetting mechanism in New South Wales, Australia. Michel Callon’s framing and overflowing metaphor is used to explain how accounting devices are brought into the mechanism, to (re)frame a space of calculability and address anxieties expressed by conservationists about calculations of net loss/gain of biodiversity.

The analysis shows that the offsetting mechanism embeds a form of accounting for biodiversity that runs counter to the prevailing dominant anthropocentric approach. Rather than accounting for the biodiversity of a site in terms of the economic benefits it provides to humans, the mechanism accounts for biodiversity in terms of its ecological value. This analysis, therefore, reveals a form of accounting for biodiversity that uses numbers to provide valuations of biodiversity, but these numbers are ecological numbers, not economic numbers. So this is a calculative, and also ecocentric, approach to accounting for, and valuing, biodiversity.

This paper contributes to the extant literature on accounting for biodiversity by revealing a novel conceptualisation of the reconciliation of economic development and biodiversity conservation, producing an ecologically defensible form of sustainable development. The paper also makes a methodological contribution by showing how Callon’s framing and overflowing metaphor can be used to enable the kind of interdisciplinary engagement needed for researchers to address sustainable development challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity in efforts to conserve biodiversity.

The paper examines a case study of biodiversity conservation efforts to restore a degraded blanket bog habitat. The analysis adopts a social nature perspective, which sees the social and the natural as inseparably intertwined in socio-ecological systems: complexes of relations between (human and non-human) actors, being perpetually produced by fluid interactions. Using a theoretical framework from the geography literature, consisting of four mutually constitutive dimensions of relations – territory, scale, network, and place (TSNP) – the analysis examines various forms of accounting for biodiversity that are centred on this blanket bog.

The analysis finds that various forms of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity have rendered this blanket bog visible and comprehensible in multiple ways, so as to contribute towards making this biodiversity conservation thinkable and possible.

This paper brings theorising from geography, concerning the social nature perspective and the TSNP framework, into the study of accounting for biodiversity. This has enabled a novel analysis that reveals the productive force of ecology-centred accounting for biodiversity, and the role of such accounting in organising the world so as to produce socio-ecological systems that aid biodiversity conservation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species in achieving biodiversity conservation and preventing the extinction of species. The Red List is a calculative device that classifies species in terms of their exposure to the risk of extinction.

The paper draws on theorising in the Social Studies of Finance literature to analyse the Red List in terms of how it frames a space of calculability for species extinction. The analysis then traces the ways that this framing has overflowed, creating conditions for calculative innovations, such that assemblages of humans and calculative devices (i.e. agencements) are constructed with collective capabilities to act to conserve biodiversity and prevent species extinctions.

This paper has traced three ways that the Red List frame has overflowed, leading to calculative innovations and the construction of new agencements. The overflow of relations between the quality of “extinction risk”, produced by the Red List, and other qualities, such as location, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of formulating conservation strategies. The overflow of relations between the identity of the “threatened species”, produced by the Red List, and other features of evaluated species, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of impelling participation in conservation efforts. The overflow of ecological relations between species, discarded by the Red List’s hierarchical metrology of extinction risk classifications, has created opportunities for conservationists to develop agencements capable of confronting society with the reality of an extinction crisis.

The paper contributes to the accounting for biodiversity literature by addressing its fundamental challenge: explaining how accounting can create conditions within society in which biodiversity conservation is made possible.

This paper seeks to examine how the biodiversity comprising a tropical forest ecosystem is being protected as a result of having its conservation brought into financial accounting calculations by constructing a greenhouse gas emissions offset product to sell on the voluntary over‐the‐counter carbon markets.

The research examines a single embedded case study of a biodiversity conservation project in Kenya. The resulting discussion builds upon the existing accounting and organisation studies literature regarding the construction of markets.

Whilst the case examined does successfully bring tropical forest biodiversity conservation into the financial accounting calculations of the sellers and buyers of the offset product, via processes of objectification and singularisation, there are considerable accounting obstacles to constructing a calculative mechanism capable of achieving this on a global scale to facilitate financing of the conservation of all the world's remaining tropical forest biodiversity.

The paper contributes to the debate on accounting for biodiversity by examining market construction as a theoretical framework for turning the loss/conservation of biodiversity from an externality into an entity that is taken into account in organisations' calculations of profit and loss.

The paper aims to carry out a comprehensive literature mapping to synthesise and descriptively analyse the research trends of biodiversity accounting, providing implications for managers and policymakers, whilst also outlining a future agenda for scholars.

A bibliometric analysis is carried out by adopting the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses protocol for searching and selecting the scientific contributions to be analysed. Citation analysis is used to map a current research front and a bibliographic coupling is conducted to detect the connection networks in current literature.

Biodiversity accounting is articulated in five thematic clusters (sub-areas), such as “Natural resource management”, “Biodiversity economic evaluation”, “Natural capital accounting”, “Biodiversity accountability” and “Biodiversity disclosure and reporting”. Critical insights emerge from the content analysis of these sub-areas.

The analysis of the thematic evolution of the biodiversity accounting literature provides useful insights to inform both practice and research and infer implications for managers, policymakers and scholars by outlining three main areas of intervention, i.e. adjusting evaluation tools, integrating ecological knowledge and establishing corporate social legitimacy.

Currently, the level of biodiversity reporting is pitifully low. Therefore, organisations should properly manage biodiversity by integrating diverse and sometimes competing forms of knowledge for the stable and resilient flow of ecosystem services for future generations.

This paper not only updates and enriches the current state of the art but also identifies five thematic areas of the biodiversity accounting literature for theoretical and practical considerations.

This paper examines the influence of the normal science tradition, epitomized by the notion that “theory is king”, on contemporary accounting research and the epistemological tensions that may emerge as this idea is applied to particular ways of studying accounting. For illustrative purposes, the authors focus on research informed by actor-network theory (ANT) which can be seen as an “extreme case” in the sense that it is, in principle, difficult to reconcile with the normal science aspirations.

The paper offers an analysis based on a close reading of how accounting scholars, using ANT, theorize, and if they do engage in explicit theorizing, how they deal with the tensions that might emerge from the need to reconcile its epistemological underpinnings with those of the normal science tradition.

The findings of this paper show that the tensions between normal science thinking and the epistemological principles of ANT have, in a few cases, been avoided, as researchers stay relatively faithful to ANT and largely refrain from further theory development. However, in most cases, the tensions have ostensibly been ignored as researchers blend the epistemology of ANT and that of normal science without reflecting on the implications of doing so.

The paper contributes to emerging debates on the role of the normal science tradition in contemporary accounting research, and also extends recent discussions on the role of theory in accounting research inspired by ANT. The paper proposes three reasons for the observed blending of epistemologies: unawareness of tensions, epistemological eclecticism and various political considerations.

Amid the current global crisis, biodiversity remains a topic that is often relegated to a few disciplines. Many issues related to the relationship between organizations and the ecosystem remain unexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the characteristics of the interrelationship between these two complex and dynamic systems.

This research is conducted using a constructivist approach, with an interpretivist perspective and a case study methodology. Through this research perspective and an exploratory multiple case study (holistic), the authors assess the implications related to the concept of biodiversity and the impacts that organizational choices could have on the consideration and management of this complex concept.

The desire of these entrepreneurs to change their ways of doing things and try to produce in a way that respects the ecosystem and enhances natural genetic diversity, while simultaneously drawing value from it in a healthy and sustainable manner, is evident. The orientation toward a sustainable and ecologically innovative business brings the concept of profit into the background on several occasions, leading these bakery entrepreneurs to be visionary green entrepreneurs (or ecopreneurs). The desire to be sustainable and to change the ways of “business as usual” makes these companies and their entrepreneurs an example of “sustainability-as-flourishing.”

By adopting the systems thinking approach and multiple case studies, this study examines the interrelation between some innovative small companies (bakeries) and biodiversity, their motivations to actively engage in biodiversity protection and their roles in protecting agrobiodiversity as well as the natural wealth of the ecosystem.

The purpose of this paper is to re-kindle debate about finding a conceptual and pragmatic basis for accounting and accountability researchers and to incorporate biodiversity management into the internal practices, routines and communication of organizations.

A qualitative interplay of theories, particularly structuration theory, applied to an interdisciplinary, communitarian and eco-centric perspective will be used to demonstrate the need for change: for researchers and practitioners to interact with other disciplines and adapt their professional, institutional and governance practices to incorporate biodiversity management and reporting within organizational structures.

Collective community action can be undertaken by aligning physical biodiversity and its setting with the interrelationship between external information structures, accountability and internal information structures, agent behaviour and the reporting of outcomes. This should assist in reducing the loss of species and richness triggered by unsound economic decision-making.

This is perhaps one of the few accounting studies which discuss theoretical frameworks for the integration of accounting/accountability systems and biological diversity information through a conceptual rethinking.

This should assist in reducing the loss of species and richness triggered by unsound economic decision-making.

This paper re-opens the debate regarding the need for an alternative conceptual approach through which biodiversity management can be incorporated into the complexities of business interactions, and the social and natural systems, by using management accounting as a primary vehicle. This is perhaps one of the few accounting studies which discuss theoretical frameworks for the integration of accounting/accountability systems and biological diversity information through a conceptual rethinking.