Accounting for What Matters: Rethinking Public Sector Accounting and Accountability for Social Sustainability and Equity

Éditeurs invités

• Iris Saliterer, University of Freiburg
• Shahjahan Bhuiyan, The American University in Cairo
• Denita Cepiku, Tor Vergata University of Rome
• Andre Lino, University of Essex
• Sean McCandless, The University of Texas at Dallas

Synthèse

Public sector organisations must balance competing demands: maintaining financial sustainability while ensuring equitable, inclusive service delivery that promotes social well-being and participation. Accounting practices traditionally prioritise economic efficiency, often creating tensions with social sustainability goals. This special issue examines how accounting frameworks can be redesigned to embed and support social sustainability alongside financial responsibility.

The challenge involves operationalising social sustainability—clarifying its conceptual foundations of equity, well-being, participation, and social capital—and translating these into concrete accounting mechanisms that protect core democratic values while adapting to context-specific needs. Organisations must also develop resilience capabilities to maintain equity commitments during economic crises, rather than defaulting to cost-cutting strategies that undermine long-term social goals. The special issue invites rigorous research that reimagines public sector accounting as a tool for fostering inclusion, trust, and sustained public value.

Thèmes proposés

• Conceptualising and measuring social sustainability and social equity in the public sector
• Embedding social sustainability goals into accounting and accountability frameworks
• Managing value trade-offs between financial and social sustainability
• Critical perspectives on existing accounting frameworks, power dynamics in the public sector, and their implications for equity
• Innovations in accounting that enable active participation, inclusion, and strengthen social capital and cohesion
• How calculative practices, classification systems and metrics can be used to challenge and reconfigure accountability frameworks towards social sustainability, rather than reinforcing the focus on financial sustainability
• How can public service organisations shift from short-term cost containment to long-term financial resilience, ensuring social sustainability in an increasingly uncertain economic landscape
• Theoretical frameworks for understanding resilience capabilities that support social sustainability
• The role of accounting in developing or constraining organisational resilience toward social outcome
• The interplay between technical accounting expertise and organizational adaptation in crisis situations
• Accounting practices that enable organizations to maintain equity commitments despite financial shocks
• Institutional dynamics supporting or hindering socially sustainable accounting practices
• In-depth case studies exploring the role of accounting in specific social contexts (healthcare, prisons, education, social services, etc.)
• Longitudinal studies tracking the evolution of accounting practices and their social impact
• Comparative analyses across different institutional settings or national contexts
• Studies of digital accounting platforms and their implications for social sustainability
• Field research combining quantitative metrics with qualitative understanding
• Critical analyses of calculative practices and their role in defining social value
• Studies examining how technical accounting instruments become tools for challenging or reinforcing power relations