Social and Environmental Accountability Journal

The Potential of Accounting and Accountability in Advancing Sustainable Cities and Communities

This special issue aims to explore the potential of accounting and accountability in advancing sustainable cities and their communities in line with SDG 11.

SDG 11 focuses on “sustainable cities and communities,” aspiring to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” (UN, 2025). While SDG 11 addresses urban sustainability, it is acknowledged that progress toward this goal is critical to the achievement of almost all other SDGs (UN-Habitat, 2020). However, the predominantly top-down orientation of the SDG framework has been criticised (Sobkowiak et al, 2020). A consequence of this in the context of SDG 11 is that the capacity of local communities to inform and transform citizen behaviour, generate and share local knowledge, and support the evolution of co-productive and participative spaces has been overlooked (Bilsky et al., 2021). Therefore, the focus of this special issue is on understanding how accounting and accountability can mobilise local capacities to support a just and transformative transition towards the achievement of SDG 11 that centres community voices.

Accounting research has the potential to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018) whilst the importance of accounting in the management and governance of cities has also been recognised (Lapsley et al., 2010). With respect to cities, accounting and accountability’s relationship with innovative city-wide re-imaginings such as doughnut cities, smart cities and circular cities has been considered (e.g., Bekier and Perisi, 2023). Furthermore, accounting and accountability’s role in local and participatory solutions, for example in participatory budgeting, has attracted the attention of accounting scholars (e.g., Jayasinghe et al., 2020). Nevertheless, such initiatives require further attention in line with the significant challenges facing cities including conflicts between diverse actors, limited voice for marginalised groups and a lack of accountability to communities. While accounting and accountability tools such as counter accounting (Thomson et al., 2015; Shu et al., 2025), emancipatory accounting (Gallhofer and Haslam, 2003) and dialogic accounting and accountability (Bebbington et al., 2007) offer potential to provide solutions to some of these challenges, the relationship between sustainable development, cities, accounting and accountability warrants further critical investigation. Based on this, we suggest that possible areas to explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How can diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches enrich our understanding of accounting and accountability’s role in advancing sustainable cities and
  communities?
• What accounting and accountability mechanisms are mobilised in cities to adapt SDG implementation to unique local contexts and ensure sustainable outcomes for diverse
  communities within cities?
• What is the role of accounting and accountability in co-productive and participative spaces which enhance the role that communities play in achieving sustainable outcomes?
• To what extent can emancipatory accounting and accountability approaches be used to shift power from city elites to marginalised communities in the pursuit of the achievement of sustainable cities and communities?
• How do conflicts within cities impede the achievement of sustainability goals, and can accounting and accountability mechanisms intervene to mediate or resolve such conflicts?

We invite researchers to submit research papers, essays, commentaries, and any other innovative research outputs to explore these questions.

References
Bebbington, J., J. Brown, B. Frame, and I. Thomson. 2007. Theorizing engagement: The potential of a critical dialogic approach. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 20, no 3: 356–381.
Bebbington, J., and J. Unerman. 2018. Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: An Enabling Role for Accounting Research. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 31, no. 1: 2-24.
Bekier, J. and C. Parisi. 2023. Co-construction of performance indicators for a circular city and its relation to a local action net. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, in press.
Bilsky, E., A.C. Moreno, and A. Fernández Tortosa. 2021. Local governments and SDG localisation: Reshaping multilevel governance from the bottom up. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 22, no. 4: 713-724.
Gallhofer, S., and J. Haslam. 2003. Accounting and Emancipation: Some Critical Interventions. Routledge.
Jayasinghe, K., P. Adhikari, S. Carmel, and A. Sopanah. 2020. Multiple rationalities of participatory budgeting in indigenous communities: Evidence from Indonesia. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 33, no. 8: 2139–2166.
Lapsley, I., P. Miller, and F. Panozzo. 2010. Accounting for the city. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal  23, no. 3: 305-324.
Shu, X., S. Smyth, C. Dey, and J. Haslam. 2025. Accounting and Conflict in the City: The Sheffield Tree Campaign, Counter-Accounts, and Bakhtinian Dialogics. Financial Accountability and Management, in press.
Sobkowiak, M., T. Cuckston, and I. Thomson. 2020. “Framing Sustainable Development Challenges: Accounting for SDG-15 in the UK.” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 33, no. 7: 1671–1703.
Thomson, I., C. Dey, and S. Russell. 2015. Activism, arenas and accounts in conflicts over tobacco control. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 28, no. 5: 809–845.
United Nations. 2025. Sustainable Goal 11. Available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal11.
UN-Habitat. 2020. World Cities Report 2020: The Value of Sustainable Urbanization. Available at: https://unhabitat.org/sites/default/files/2020/10/wcr_2020_report.pdf.