publication

The political life of mitigation from carbon accounting to agrarian counter-accounts

Authors:
Diego Enrique SILVA GARZON
Shaila SESHIA
2023

This article seeks to stimulate analysis of how accounting knowledge, techniques, and practices work to incorporate agriculture and land use into climate mitigation. Accounting plays a significant role in the ways that capitalism inserts itself into, reworks, or reorganises agrarian webs of life. To study these processes, we train our critical gaze on accounting itself – its epistemic foundations, instruments, and narratives, and their implications for agrarian livelihoods and relations. Through the notion of “agrarian counter-accounts,” we conclude by considering the potential of alternative methodologies and understandings of account-giving, taking, and holding in struggles for agrarian climate justice.