P01 SIG Accounting and Accountability

Panel Chairs

• Iris Saliterer (Corresponding Chair), University of Freiburg, Germany, Iris.Saliterer@vwl.uni-freiburg.de
• Deborah Agostino, Politecnico Milano, Italy
• Enrico Bracci, Universitá di Ferrara, Italy
• Temirlan T. Moldogaziev, Indiana University Bloomington, US
• Tobias Polzer, WU Vienna, Austria
• Ileana Steccolini, University of Bologna, Italy & University of Essex, UK
• Mariafrancesca Sicilia, University of Bergamo, IT
• Anna Thomasson, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Description of the Panel

The Special Interest Group (SIG) on Accounting and Accountability seeks to advance interdisciplinary research on how accounting practices, accountability mechanisms, and control systems shape and are shaped by the evolving architecture of public governance. This year we focus on the role and facets of accounting and accountability in an age of polycrisis, in which climate change, geopolitical instability, fiscal stress, digital disruption and democratic backsliding increasingly interact and compound, leaving public administrations in search of safety and security.

In doing so, we particularly encourage scholars to investigate the role of accounting in identifying, weighing and translating risks, values and interests under such conditions: which risks become visible, whose safety and security count when resources are (re)allocated, and how governments account for decisions taken under pressure and uncertainty. This also raises the question of how predictive analytics, early-warning systems and scenario-based risk information are incorporated — or fail to be incorporated — into accounting, budgeting and auditing practices, and into accountability arrangements for preparedness, prevention and service continuity. Accounting can hereby serve as a tool for transparency, resilience, sustainability and citizen empowerment, while it can equally work as an instrument of control, opacity and marginalisation - a duality that becomes particularly acute in states of emergency and in security-driven policy fields. We welcome contributions from all geographic contexts exploring the technical as well as the political, ethical and social dimensions of these developments, including critical and practice-informed scholarship and research.

The panel encourages research that addresses, but is not limited to, questions within three interconnected sub-themes:

Accounting for resilience and crisis governance in times of polycrisis

• To what extent, and how, are accounting, budgeting, auditing and risk-reporting systems evolving when crises compound rather than alternate, and how do the temporal dynamics of multiple crises shape resilience priorities and approaches?
• What role does accounting play in building financial, organizational and community resilience, and in keeping citizen wellbeing, equity and climate risk visible in crisis response?
• How can accounting and reporting systems evolve from retrospective recording to prospective steering tools for addressing wicked problems?

Accounting for safety and security: emergency governance and democratic accountability

• How does the shift towards defense and security spending reshape budgetary priorities, trade-offs and social equity, and how is it accounted for, reported and audited?
• How do transparency and accountability mechanisms operate in security-sensitive domains, where claims to secrecy collide with democratic oversight?
• In contexts of democratic backsliding and states of emergency, how is accounting mobilised to undermine institutional checks and balances, and how can accountability mechanisms, including supreme audit institutions, be fortified?

Digital accountability, algorithmic control and emerging AI practices

• How are digital platforms, AI and data infrastructures reshaping accounting, auditing and accountability practices in the public sector, and what is needed to ensure accountability for opaque algorithms?
• How do cybersecurity threats, disinformation and data vulnerabilities challenge the reliability and integrity of public sector accounting, reporting and oversight?
• How do we account for the ethical, financial, and democratic costs of these technologies and what competencies, roles and professional identities do public sector accountants and auditors need in this environment?

How can accounting, risk-reporting and digital control systems support answerability and scrutiny when data-driven tools make foreseeable risks visible, while responsibility for preventive action is distributed across experts, public managers, organisations and levels of government?

The SIG Panel calls for theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions from multiple perspectives, disciplines and methodological approaches.

Relevance to Public Management and/or Conference Theme

The panel speaks directly to the conference theme by examining how public administrations account for safety and security in an age of polycrisis. Accounting and accountability are at the core of how governments recognise, prioritise and respond to compounding crises: through budgets, risk reporting, audits and performance information, diffuse threats are translated into decisions on resources, priorities and responsibilities. The panel thereby connects accounting scholarship with broader public management debates on crisis governance, resilience, democratic accountability and digitalization. By focusing on the structural adaptations of accounting and accountability, the panel moves beyond descriptive crisis management, from an interdisciplinary point of observation. Practically, it addresses questions of immediate salience for governments in Europe and beyond: how to fund and account for rising defence and security spending, while sustaining social investment, equity, and sustainability; how to preserve transparency and audit capacity in emergency and security domains; how to deploy AI and digital infrastructures in an accountable and trustworthy manner; and how to deal with the ‘dark sides’ and re-bound effects of these developments, for example with respect to public value. In doing so, the panel offers policymakers and public managers clear guardrails on how to justify, measure, and audit highly sensitive security expenditures. Building on more than a decade of SIG panels at IRSPM, the panel offers a venue for interdisciplinary exchange and welcomes early career researchers as well as practice-informed contributions.