Critical environmental accounting and accountability in anti-democratic times: Agonistic repoliticization and critical environmental politics

To foster and advance critical environmental accounting and accountability (CEAA) research, we argue there is a need to foreground the political dimensions of environmental issues by addressing plurality, conflict, contestability and power. Contemporary environmental accounting and accountability (EAA), especially as it is increasingly mainstreamed, often remains entrenched in allegedly apolitical technocratic-managerial and market logics. At the same time climate denialism and authoritarian neoliberalism intensify pressures against critical research. Drawing on critical environmental politics scholarship, we interpret these developments as part of broader depoliticizing and anti-democratic formations that narrow the questions EAA asks, how problems are represented, and the socio-ecological futures imaginable. Focusing on climate change, we position critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA) as one possible path for politically revitalizing EAA by deepening understanding of, and providing responses to, the anti-democratic conditions that blunt EAA's critical force.