New Accounting for the Management of Ecosystems - Introduction

After the recent development of accounting for biodiversity and ecosystems at the business level and at the national level, a third construction site in accounting research is necessary at the scale of inter-organizational ecosystem management. This calls for a constructive dialogue between conservationists who design and use new information systems on ecosystems in multiple contexts but face challenges in obtaining the political and social changes they expect, and critical accounting researchers who can provide deep knowledge on the connections between information, accounts exchange, accountabilities, values and all forms of collective organized action. The workshop will build on the presence of a strong community of conservation research and practice in Cambridge (notably based at the University of Cambridge's Conservation Research Institute and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative), and will provide them for the first time with a space to engage with critical and social and environmental accounting researchers. We hope that this new interdisciplinary bridge will set off theoretical elaborations, as well as concrete working relationships and future experimentations of accounting for the management of ecosystems innovations that can ultimately lead to better achievement of ecological and social results. The new path of research that this workshop will discuss will provide a critical, theoretical and practical alternative to the already well-established collaborations of conservation research with the field of economics. The conference will combine intensive closed workshop sessions with two public events on the topic.