Accounting research that matters: The potential of prefigurative environmental experimentation

This paper explores the potential of prefigurative environmental experimentation to revitalize and reorient critical accounting scholarship toward meaningful engagement with planetary crises. It responds to longstanding critiques that much of the field remains preoccupied with critiquing dominant institutions, while neglecting actionable responses to environmental and social injustices. Building upon political ecology, deep ecology, ecofeminism, posthumanism and ontological politics, we advocate for the integration of prefiguration—a concept rooted in enacting future alternatives in the present—into accounting research, activism, and pedagogy. Prefigurative politics challenge dominant capitalist logics by fostering participatory, non- hierarchical, and ecologically sustainable practices at the grassroots level. The paper argues that accounting scholars have a unique role to play in these experiments by co-producing alternative forms of accountability and redefining predominant forms of accounts to reflect the values, aspirations and knowledge of diverse communities, including the non-human world. Prefigurative environmental accounting is conceptualized as an activist, pedagogic and scholarly practice that supports community-led world-making. Augmenting more familiar forms of adversarial resistance, it requires interstitial, affirmative, and dialogic engagements that enable communities to design their own accounting systems aligned with localized sustainability visions. In doing so, it challenges traditional accounting education and proposes a re-imagined pedagogy that fosters critical, pluralistic, and emancipatory approaches to socio-ecological transformation. Ultimately, the paper presents prefiguration as both a theoretical and practical avenue for transformative change within critical accounting. It invites scholars to engage with prefigurative experiments not merely as objects of study, but as collaborators in cultivating sustainable futures. This intervention aims to realign critical accounting with its emancipatory roots and contribute to addressing the urgent challenges of the Anthropocene.