Introducing Management Accounting for Ecosystems: Towards a new theoretical and practical perspective to organize the collective management of ecosystems

In our contribution to the previous session of the Ecological Accounts Workshop (St- Andrews, August 2014), we pointed out the increasing discrepancy between on the one side the ever-increasing efforts led by biodiversity conservation researchers to develop innovative calculative practices on ecosystems (new ecological indicators, ecosystem services assessment tools, fish stock monitoring etc.), and on the other side the amount of obstacles encountered by conservation practitioners who use these new calculative practices on the field in the hope to effectively contribute to biodiversity protection (many various stakeholders and no unity of agency in ecosystem management, contested metrics, little use of the information produced in real decision-making etc.). In order to contribute to the biodiversity conservation community's efforts to address this issue, we proposed a theoretical perspective based on the combination of interdisciplinary accounting research with other theoretical frameworks useful to enrich our understanding of the production, formatting and use of ecological information in the context of organized action for ecosystem conservation (Bruno Latour's "Politics of Nature"; Boltanski and Thévenot's On Justification; Our own "Strategic Environmental Management Analysis" etc.). For this second Ecological Accounts workshop, we draw on this theoretical perspective to present two complementary sets of propositions and results. Firstly, we propose an accounting framework useful to map the landscape of the diversity of ecological accounting issues related to ecosystem quality management. The framework articulates and connects various accounting perspectives together by distinguishing two broad types of accounting activities: on the one hand we find these already well- developed activities that consist in producing aggregated accounts/"balance sheets" on ecosystem quality or on business and organizations' impacts on ecosystems (national or territorial green accounting, Social and Environmental accounting, company's sustainability reports on ecosystem services etc.). On the other hand, we find these accounting activities that are useful to practically organize the collective management and conservation of ecosystems between a varieties of stakeholders willing to contribute to this task (including for instance firms from the environmental sector). We propose to call this second group of activities "Management Accounting for Ecosystems" and suggest that they still remain largely under-developed, while they could bring many contributions to ecosystem conservation efforts. As a second set of propositions, we will thus focus on the theoretical and practical steps that we think are necessary to design and develop "Management Accounting for Ecosystems" accounts and activities, and to better articulate them to other and more developed forms of environmental accounts. We hope that this work can contribute both to biodiversity conservation researchers and practitioners on the field, as well as to accounting researchers engaged in the production of new ecological accounts and accountability frameworks.