Hi Friend,

"I love this mash up of accounting, accountability, and decolonial praxis. Brilliant!!" said a friend when we showed them our new Account-ability workshop.

Which basically sums up how many of our amazing colleagues and friends are responding to our new offering. We still have some spots left. It's this coming Monday, just a few days away. Please do join us!

As Krissy and I have been preparing for this workshop, I've been going back to my days as a social scientist, which was prior to becoming an eco-theologian. What follows is some content/ideas around some of the histories of accounting as they intersect with the legacies of colonization. The workshop itself is more practical than historical, but it helps to brush up on this history.  I hope you might find it interesting!

I used to be a student and a researcher in a field that a lot of people don't know even exists: Science, Technology, and Society (STS). It's a combination of fields - kind of like a sociological study of science, technology, and the people who are in those fields. (Most of it is based on European and American cultures).

I became interested in STS because of a particular phrase: "The politics of knowledge." I loved the idea of better understanding how we can bring different kinds of knowledge together to create better solutions - especially traditional ecological knowledge, intuitive knowledge, emotional knowledge, and scientific knowledge. (This underscores my remembering work). At the time, I was based at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England. Better understanding how we can understand one another across different epistemologies (ways of knowing) felt super pertinent to the lives of everyday people in Kenya, where I had been working (this was before I went to India), and to our collective capacity to build climate resilience

And then the financial crisis of 2008 happened. It was immediately clear that financial markets had a huge impact.... but it was harder to understand how or why. In addition to organizing teach-ins about the financial system and becoming really intrigued with alternative economic and monetary systems, I went down an intellectual rabbit hole around what we might think of as a sociology of finance. much of this starts with accounting, which was developed, as a profession, in the 1800s. (The first professional accounting group was based in Scotland in the 1830s.) Surrounded by researchers who were focusing on understanding poverty and climate change in Africa and Asia, I focused on understanding wealth and climate change amongst the high financiers in London. Really, it was just different approaches to the same challenge.

If you are interested, I'm happy to talk more about it. I wrote a rather (too) long thesis about it. I'm quite content for that to remain unpublished!  but I learned a lot.

Here is some of what I learned that is relevant to our upcoming workshop ... and perhaps for you in other spaces as well.

1) No technology is entirely neutral. (In the STS field, accounting is a type of technology.) That said, most technologies can be used for both oppressive and liberatory purposes. It's both how you use them.... AND how (and by whom) the technologies are designed to be used makes critical difference.  

2) Accounting was and continues to be part of the imperial bureaucratic system that enabled and enacted colonial power. It played a significant role in taking away land and other resources away from indigenous peoples. morally inferior for their lack of (amongst other things) said accounting systems.

3) Accounting goes hand in hand with mapping, contracts, deeds, paperwork, written treaties, and certain types of legal and judicial frameworks. It includes transferring animate beings like trees into inanimate objects like "resources" that are added up in long columns that can be easily organized.

All of these things (numbers and words) came to define "values". How values are defined, interpreted, and measured impacts people at all levels, from their personal household to their government. This fractal dynamic is part of the huge, still much-debated question of "what do we value" and "how do we measure it" that plagues economists, environmentalists, and most of the folks I know who are seeking sustainability.

4) Accountants, like financiers, AI tech programmers, and other highly trained experts (medical professionals, engineers, etc.), develop their own language, culture, attitudes, and ways of interacting with one another and with their technology/science that tend to lead that science/technology to be experienced as a kind of "black box" to outsiders - ie, everyday citizens. The way our society relates to scientific expertise leads to exclusionary practices: it's hard for ordinary people to know what the ‘experts’ are talking about… and thus to understand what kinds of questions should or even could be asked. 

Attitudes of superiority tend to accompany expertise. The expert usually has worked hard to be able to acquire the capacity to "speak" in their language (be that a language of numbers or words or symbols), and with that education comes a kind of "we are better than you" attitude. Not always - plenty of people don't have that! But it is part of what we can think of as "exclusionary practices” that influence both entry into the profession and how people can engage.

In the case of accountants, this has all contributed to some disturbing numbers: In the United States, 64% are White. 12% are Asian. 8.5% are black. .02% are Native. (To help address this, in 2020, the American Indian Graduate Center created a $2 million scholarship initiative for Native CPAs). 

and…. Most accountants really just want to help their clients get their numbers right. I’m very appreciative of mine!

5) Understanding these histories is really important. And it's not enough to just critique!

So this last part is something I read a lot in the scientific literature. Sometimes I could feel the exasperation of the authors. They could analyze the history, eloquently show patterns of relationships, and point to problems, but they also struggle to find ways to bring their knowledge towards something that could be useful. Some point to some broad directional possibilities. For example, accounting needs to be more inclusive, AND indigenous values need to be included in accounting systems, which require the systems themselves to change.

At the time, I didn't know what to do either. 

Not just about accounting, but the general problem. Which is everywhere.

Systems of compliance pervade our lives. Sometimes they perpetuate all sorts of institutional harm.

Myself, I had to get out of the space of pure criticism before I could start finding something that could enable me to both live in this world and work towards a different one.

That included grappling with some of my own "issues" around money and spreadsheets and numbers. And for me to see some of the nuance and benefits that are also part of this complex story. 

Accounting and spreadsheets and budgets can, in addition to perpetuating harm, also be very helpful. (That's why Krissy got into accounting afterall: she's a very practical person).  They can help people and organizations to ground, to center, to put things clearly, to organize, to see their own (non-financial) values reflected in their finances. When I work with clients, we often talk about "ok, how does this big cool idea fit into the budget?" and if we can't see how to put a line-item next to the idea, well, it probably won't happen... or something else is needed.

Our budgets reflect lived (not necessarily aspirational) values. They tend to reflect both our own values and the values of our society (which values ownership and objects). There's a reason that there's a long history of religious-informed activists who refer to collective (such as government) budgets as "moral documents"!

Which is part of why I think our little workshop on Monday feels worth the energy to create (and hopefully for you to come to as well). We are not just about critique. We do recognize some of the continuing impacts of colonial histories (which matter a lot). And it's certainly not just, "you need to get over your money stories." Or, "align yourself spiritually, and more money will flow to you." Or, "There is something wrong with you that this is so hard for you."

It's bringing a small dose of heart medicine to what can be a difficult topic... one in which we are all embedded, and which deserves some restorative, practical approaches.

All of which has been missing for way too long.