Accounting for Anti-corruption in Social and Environmental Accounting Research: Re-Centring Local Realities and Global Frameworks in Africa

This commentary calls for a renewed and critical engagement with anti-corruption in social and environmental accounting (SEA) research by foregrounding the political, institutional, and cultural dynamics that shape governance in African contexts. It argues that anti-corruption reforms, when introduced into political systems structured by informal politics, reciprocity, and patronage, are often reconstituted to serve rather than challenge elite interests. From a Western perspective, such reforms appear as governance ‘failures’, yet, within African political economies, they operate coherently by sustaining hybrid systems of authority and accountability that reflect local logics of power. This dynamic complicates dominant anti-corruption narratives in SEA, revealing that accounting-based reforms designed to promote transparency and sustainability can inadvertently reinforce existing power asymmetries and overlook local accountability practices. By conceptualising corruption and anti-corruption initiatives as intertwined processes within both local and transnational systems of wealth extraction, the paper positions Africa as a source of theoretical innovation for rethinking how SEA engages with accountability, justice, and global sustainability. It calls for decolonial approaches to anti-corruption that recognise how global frameworks interact with local institutions, producing outcomes that are socially embedded, politically negotiated, and often far removed from Western notions of institutional success.