Imagining Otherwise: Conceptualising Sustainability in an Era of Extractivism Through an Agonistic Feminist Lens: A Response to Gendron (2024)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the tension between sustainability, accounting and governance from an agonistic pluralist perspective adopting feminism as a methodology. Inspired by a commentary by Gendron (2024, in this issue) on the trustworthiness of science in the light of industry sponsorship of academic institutions, this article questions more deeply the acceptance of an extractive mindset which weaves into the organising of society as it influences what topics to prioritise and what to leave out of the mainstream narrative. The article draws in particular from the work of Mouffe (2000, 2013; see also Laclau and Mouffe, 2014) and Davis (2016). These studies, alongside other work, in particular by Black and Indigenous scholars, seeking to dismantle the oppressive bodies of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy, have inspired my own reflections for this article. While these are all complex issues in and of themselves, which need further exploration beyond the rich body of existing literature, discussing them together and in relation to sustainability provides an opportunity to realise the equivalences in the struggles and encourage the formation of solidarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Agonistic pluralism
• feminist theory
• sustainability accounting
• extractive industries
• gender equality

Introduction

In his polemical essay, Yves Gendron (2024, in this issue) expresses concerns regarding the recently announced AAA conference on Accounting, Governance and Sustainability which was to be held in Saudi Arabia, hosted by the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in December last year¹ (rescheduled to 2024). From my reading of Yves’ paper, the key question is whether a conference on sustainability hosted by a university which carries the sponsorship of oil and mineral sectors in its name can be legitimate. In addition, Yves touches on the tension between mainstream and alternative understandings of sustainability as a starting point for his curious inquiry. However, the main argument is built on the trustworthiness of academic thought in an environment that has visible industry ties, hence, questioning if there is a possibility of exploring ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ sustainability (research) at this conference.

In the endeavour to explore this question, I will first comment briefly on how sustainability is constructed in this debate. It is important to be sensitive of such construction as it allows us to reflect on who we are constructing as ‘we’ and who we are constructing as ‘they’. As a critical researcher, I am required to continuously reflect on my own positionality. As such, I wonder if my engagement with sustainability in North America can be any more or less ‘authentic’ than by a researcher in Saudi Arabia. I ask myself if my experienced unease or tension is related to a feeling of ‘entitlement’ to own the ‘true’ meaning of sustainability as if I was independent from the tentacles of capitalism and corporate patronage. At the core of this reflection, I question: am I/we constructing the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals as the ‘Other’? What does it mean to take pluralism seriously in this context?

In answering these questions, I will borrow some of the terminology and concepts from the work on agonistic pluralism, in particular the writings of Chantal Mouffe and her co-authored work with Ernest Laclau (Mouffe 2000, 2013; Laclau and Mouffe 2014). Their work allows me to articulate more clearly the construction of the above-mentioned frontiers which constitute the ‘we’ and ‘they’. While their work emphasises that the construction of these frontiers is unavoidable, it also highlights that they need to be seen as temporary and always contestable. These contestable spaces, the constant possibility of antagonism, is what they call ‘the political’.

Through the lens of pluralism, as I will argue, there is a connection between the construction of sustainability, the construction of an extractive mindset, and the exploitation of the (female) body.

In my perspective, these kinds of connections must be made explicit as they expose the common denominator in a series of seemingly independent struggles.² Black feminist literature has allowed me to gain a richer understanding of agonistic pluralism, hence, I blend both perspectives into the phrase ‘agonistic feminism’. For this article, I draw in particular from the feminist work by Angela Y. Davis, a critical scholar and civil rights activist, who is known for her involvement in the prison abolition movement and her outspoken work against violence, in particular violence against black women, trans and non-binary gender, and her critical theoretical development of the feminist methodology (which I will explain further in the next paragraph). Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944 and grew up in the racially segregated Southern US during Jim Crow laws (Davis 2023, 67–69). Her progressive upbringing got her involved with the Communist Party as a teenager. Later, she studied philosophy in the US, in France (Paris) and Germany (Frankfurt). In Paris, anti-Algerian racism influenced her understandings of international racism and colonialism which she connected back to US antiblack racism (James 1998). Her imprisonment³ has informed her nuanced work focusing on the intersection between imprisonment, gender and race (Métraux 2022). In her work, she emphasises the importance of transnational solidarity and often refers to the global ‘Free Angela’ movement which she says was important for the final court decision to acquit her.

Feminist thought, in my reading of Davis, provides the lens through which we can connect complex local or individual issues with larger (global) issues while acknowledging the differences in histories and experiences (Davis 2016). Feminism, according to her, is about making conscious interventions: she states that she likes to ‘talk about feminism not as something that adheres to bodies, not as something grounded in gendered bodies, but as an approach – as a way of conceptualising, as a methodology, as a guide to strategies for struggle’ (Davis 2016, 27). She highlights that feminism is also changing, and as such, it is no longer possible to speak about feminism without considering race or to speak about antiracist movements without considering gender. Furthermore, she emphasises that Black movements now consider anti-Muslim racism⁴ and that dimensions of class, nationality and ethnicity also need to be considered. While not directly referencing Black feminist work,⁵ Laclau and Mouffe, who have theorised the success of social movements, also argue that our own stories need to be connected to the larger hegemonic discourse to formulate a struggle. This process allows and requires us to identify the adversary in relation to which the injustice is observed or perceived, to dis-articulate and re-articulate the hegemonic discourse. The main aims of my commentary are to highlight the importance of contesting the mainstream narrative of sustainability, in particular with respect to social justice as it connects to dimensions of class, race and gender (among others). The case of resource extraction is used to make these connections.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. First, I will map out sustainability as the perceived contested area and introduce some concepts and language developed in the work of agonistic pluralism. This will be helpful to explore the key concerns and their interconnectedness with the conceptualisation of sustainability. I will do this from a feminist perspective which will be useful in connecting the multi-dimensionality of struggles. Second, I will discuss the framing of resource extraction in the light of sustainability as it has become embedded into the hegemonic discourse through the capturing of the green transition movement. In this section, I will make connections between capitalism, resource extraction and colonialism and how they relate to sustainability. Next, I will discuss the connection between sustainability and gender equality. I summarise my key points in the conclusion and reflect on what these might mean for the AAA conference on Accounting, Governance and Sustainability.

Connecting Sustainability and Agonistic Feminism

My reading of Yves’ article is that he questions the seriousness with which the AAA approaches sustainability, as they form an alliance with the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. Yves also alludes to the disconnect between mainstream accounting research on sustainability and the body of research conducted by members of the CSEAR community. One of the key elements in this disconnect is the question of what sustainability means.

Mainstream accounting (and management) research on sustainability⁶ is generally concerned, in one way or another, with the business case⁷ for sustainability (i.e. does it ‘pay’ to be good, through increased financial performance, identification and management of risk, and hence, reduced cost of capital, etc.) (Yang et al. 2021). While the business case has been questioned by some (see for instance, Busch et al. 2024), matters of sustainability are still seen as something external, separable or disparate from the core business⁸ (Barker and Mayer 2024), or at best intertwined with it (Ballou et al., 2012).⁹ There is, however, little or no attempt to move towards an embedded view, in which organisations are inseparable from society and nature (Marcus et al., 2010; Elkington 2018).

The CSEAR community is more broadly concerned with embeddedness of organisations in society and nature¹⁰ and some scholars have thus contested the notion that ‘sustainability’ can be assessed on an organisational level (Gray and Milne 2002; Gray 2010). Instead, it is argued that an organisation should be understood as a small part in a larger ecosystem (Gray 2010) and that it cannot be assumed that the aggregation of ‘good’ (incremental) performance will altogether be ‘sustainable’ (Gray 2006, 2010; Gray and Milne 2002; Laine, Tregidga, and Unerman 2021; Milne and Gray 2013; Milne, Kearins, and Walton 2006). Unless there is some kind of normative goal, threshold, or boundary (Thomas and McElroy 2017; Gray 2017; Thurm 2017), sustainability accounting/reporting is like a journey without destination (Milne, Kearins, and Walton 2006; Gray 2006).

Expanding further on the understanding of sustainability as a way of operating within the planet’s outer limits (planetary boundaries) and inner limits (social foundations) brings into our awareness the relationship between sustainability and social justice that is often left out from mainstream sustainability discourses (UNEP 1981; Raworth 2017; Dey and Russell 2014). The different conceptualisations of sustainability between mainstream and alternative accounting researchers, as a consequence, lead to different demands for accounting, in the prioritising of information, the implications on managerial behaviour, and the scope of accountability among others. Mainstream approaches often conceptualise sustainability as the sum of isolated factors (and less often expose the interdepend relationships and power dynamics). Treating social or environmental accounts in isolation therefore works to retain the status quo. As the mainstream discourse is taking up more space (in the process of counter-hegemonic struggles), the alternative formulation of sustainability accounting becomes harder to imagine.

Feminist work aims at challenging hegemonic discourses as it reveals many ways in which various webs of injustices are weaved together under a complex system of capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy (Senkl and Cooper 2023). Moreover, feminist work highlights the importance of the collective. As Angela Davis points out,

Since the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism, it has become especially important to identify the dangers of individualism. Progressive struggles – whether they are focused on racism, repression, poverty, or other issues – are doomed to fail if they do not also attempt to develop a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism. (Davis 2016, 1)¹¹

In agonistic terms, connecting individual issues with the broader, already existing hegemonic discourse happens through the recognition of a so-called chain of equivalences¹² (Laclau and Mouffe 2014). These chains of equivalences allow us to express how – although the histories and experiences of individuals and communities are different – there is a common struggle which is negated by the dominant hegemonic discourse. According to Laclau and Mouffe (2014), the formation of a chain of equivalences is essential to the success of social movements. Black feminist scholars remind us to explore how our histories intertwine (Maynard 2017; Maynard and Simpson 2022; hooks 1994; Ogundipe-Leslie 1994; Olufemi 2020; Hill Collins and Bilge 2020), as in the following quote by Davis (2016, 135): ‘Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories’ (135).

While the above is to encourage mutual understanding, it also highlights the importance to understand how our own identity has been and is constantly shaped by our surrounding. The notion of the ‘constitutive outside [which] is present within the inside’, this very ‘point of confluence between objectivity and power’ is what Mouffe (2013) understands as hegemony. She therefore warns that ‘we should not conceptualise power as an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves’ (Mouffe 2000, 21; see also Laclau and Mouffe 2014). This is essential in the sense that as much as alternative approaches to sustainability accounting can be interpreted as potentially counter-hegemonic discursive practices, they are also potentially absorbed into the hegemonic discourse in a way that we do not realise how much we are contributing to the maintenance of the status quo (Spence 2007). Davis formulates this confluence between objectivity and power as follows:

Feminist approaches urge us to develop understandings of social relations, whose connections are often initially only intuited. Everyone is familiar with the slogan ‘The personal is political’ – not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, or emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We ourselves often do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to the work of racism and repression. (Davis 2016)

This perspective requires a more holistic approach to sustainability. Coming back to the question of resource extraction, for instance, would mean to assess the political, social, environmental, cultural and historical contexts (e.g. Apostol, Mäkelä, and Vinnari 2023; Lauwo and Otusanya 2014). Sustainability, in this perspective, cannot be fully assessed on an organisational level. On the other hand, if sustainability is framed as an organisation-level concept the issue becomes more one of incremental performance on isolated social or environmental indicators (e.g. being industry leader, among the top 10 companies in a region, or better than in the prior year, etc.). In this context, the involvement or sponsorship of research is less problematic, if the research is not about assessing sustainability but rather developing ways to improve performance (in an engineering sense), for instance, through the development of certain technologies. Accounting in this sense would play the role of tracking individual performances metrics, e.g. energy use.

In this section, I have expanded on Yves’ noted tension between mainstream and alternative constructions of sustainability. The formulation of sustainability as technological challenge (contest) and its consequences in relation to extractive industries will be further discussed in the next section.

Normalising the Extractive Mindset

Extraction isn’t just about mining and drilling, it’s a mindset – it’s an approach to nature, to ideas, to people. (Naomi Klein in a conversation with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Klein 2013)

In the previous section, I have elaborated on the mainstream narrative of sustainability as a corporate-centered concept and how this narrative increases the space for the extractive industries through depictions of ‘good’ companies within a controversial industry. I have also explained that a system-based (or embedded) approach to sustainability acknowledges inner and outer system limits, hence, is a function of planetary boundaries and social foundations (Baue and Thurm 2022; Raworth 2017). Literature in accounting has, to some extent, explored these broader issues (e.g. Apostol 2015; Apostol, Mäkelä, and Vinnari 2023; Denedo, Thomson, and Yonekura 2019; Lauwo and Otusanya 2014; Lauwo, Otusanya & Bakre, 2016). However, more research is needed to explore the complexities of these dimensions (Samkin, Mihret, and Lemma 2024; Lodhia and Hess 2014).

Political science literature has recently noted that the entire resource extractive complex has been re-framed in the hegemonic discourse as a relevant part of society’s transition to a green economy (Le Billon 2021; Deberdt and Le Billon 2024). Working towards a sustainable future has largely become a function of technological innovation and production (for instance of solar panels, electric vehicles, etc.). This body of literature has emphasised that missing in the narrative of low-carbon transitions, are ‘downstream and upstream processes, such as mining or waste flows’ (Sovacool et al. 2020), even though ‘resource extraction has more than tripled since 1970, underwriting a fivefold increase in the use of non-metallic minerals’. Deberdt and Le Billon (2024) argue that ‘the green transition is more akin to climate extractivism in that it reproduces high-intensity extraction and wealth accumulation justified by the climate crisis, with strongly differentiated outcomes, mostly benefitting already privileged classes’ (see also Le Billon 2021). In its broader sense, the concept of extractivism refers to a high volume and intensity of extraction intended for export (Dorn, Hafner, and Plank 2022, 2). It has often been used in the context of imperialism and can, more specifically, be described as a ‘nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue’ (Klein 2015, 169). It can be argued that the prioritisation of ‘profits through the ongoing pursuit of ‘green’ consumption by a decarbonised class’, is harmful to less privileged communities and lands (Deberdt and Le Billon 2024). In a similar vein, Sovacool et al. (2020, citing studies by Baldé et al. 2017 and Sthiannopkao and Wong 2013) highlight that the approximately 50 million metric tons of global e-waste are mainly disposed in Africa and Asia while the main producers and consumers are based in Europe and the United States. This adds to exploitation of people and lands through the mining at the front end of the low-carbon industry (Sovacool et al., 2020). As such, extractivism also relates to the notion that some people and areas can be sacrificed for the benefit of global (northern) economic benefit (Klein 2015, 169; see also Healy, Stephens, and Malin 2019).¹³

In terminology of agonistics, the process through which efforts or ‘demands which challenge the hegemonic order are appropriated by the existing system as to satisfy them in a way that neutralises their subversive potential’¹⁴ are called hegemonic interventions (Mouffe 2013, 73). In this sense, one could argue that the notion of systemic change towards sustainability has been appropriated into the narrative of ‘green’ capitalism which might indeed lead to lower emissions but also ‘push[es] the burden of climate mitigation onto the poorest people, least responsible for emissions, while concentrating the rents and technological fruits of decarbonised future in the hands of privileged classes’ (Deberdt and Le Billon 2024, 2). Furthermore, as a part of this neutralising (or normalising) process, the hegemonic discourse increasingly appropriates all aspects of our lives¹⁵; something Angela Davis repeatedly highlights, for instance in the following:

It’s interesting that in this era of global capitalism the corporations have learned (…) how to access aspects of our lives that cause us to often express our innermost dreams in terms of capitalist commodities. (…) What I want to point out is that the megacorporations have clearly grasped the ways in which what we often consider to be disparate issues are connected. (Davis 2016, 142)

These mechanisms (as mentioned earlier) make it more and more difficult to envision counter-hegemonic discourses¹⁶ and as such their recognition brings to the fore the importance of the formation of a chain of equivalences, which is to say, the necessity to connect individual stories into a global struggle and to articulate them politically¹⁷ (Mouffe 2013, 74). However, the formation of a chain of equivalences does not mean the eradication of differences between various histories and experiences rather the identification and conceptualisation of a common adversary which negates all of the individual demands and as such combines the individual stories in this struggle (Mouffe 2013; Laclau and Mouffe 2014).

From this, we can see more clearly that the tensions between mainstream and alternative¹⁸ accounting research go much deeper than the question whether sustainability can be measured on an organisational level or not. The construction of sustainability is indicative of one’s position towards capitalism and hence the connections one might be willing to make to extractivism. From a pluralist perspective, one cannot but also acknowledge that the impacts of resource extraction are not carried equally throughout society. Thus, the question of sustainability becomes much more complex.

Canada, from where I write this article, is the home of over a thousand mining companies (NRCan 2024) and approximately half of the world’s mining companies are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (NRCan 2024 see also Maynard and Simpson 2022, 14). It is also heavily invested in oil sand mining in northwest Alberta (Greenpeace Canada 2021). These operations have huge environmental impacts, for instance through de-forestation, water use and pollution, air pollution, carbon emissions, moreover, they are destroying habitat for wildlife and encroaching on traditional lands of Indigenous People who depend on these lands for their culture and way of life (NASA Earth Observatory n.d.). Canada publicly upholds liberal values and the dominant narrative is aligned with the wider hegemonic discourse in which resource extraction and the depiction of environmental ambition do not appear to stand in conflict. However (as pointed out by prior literature, e.g. Arnold and Hammond 1994), excluded from the dominant discourse are the various social and environmental injustices experienced disproportionally by Black and Indigenous Peoples, as the following quote by Robyn Maynard highlights:

[d]espite its pretensions of being a “benevolent” nation-state, Canada plays an important role in the massive carbon unloading, and the ecological and human devastation brought by extractive industries. These industries produce over 50 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, not to mention the cataclysmic environmental devastation of the tar sands pipelines that run through more than 350 Indigenous nations in so-called Canada alone. Much of the unmaking of Black and Indigenous lives and the ecosystems that have historically sustained our lives, spanning Turtle Island, the Caribbean, Africa, and South and Central America, can be traced right back here. (Maynard and Simpson 2022, 11)

This dis-articulation of the hegemonic discourse is important, also, in the reflection on the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals as the Other.

The King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals provides an impressive account of their sustainability goals and formulates steps through which they move towards achieving the sustainable development goals (KFUPM-Sustainability n.d.). The university has set the goals to be independent (free) from fossil fuel by 2050 and to operate on 100% renewable energy by 2060. The achievement of these goals is linked to the university’s research excellence in the energy and technology areas and the country’s ability to use solar energy extensively. This is aligned with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, according to which half of the Kingdom’s energy will be sourced through renewable energy, as they work towards Net Zero by 2060 (see Vision 2030). At the same time, Saudi Arabia has plans to increase oil extraction approximately by a factor of five between 2021 and 2030 (Carrington 2023a). As the usage of fossil fuels within the Kingdom and other countries will decrease as a consequence of their commitment to meet the Nationally Determined Contributions in relation to the Paris Agreement, there is a strategic effort made to export oil to developing countries through the so-called oil demand sustainability programme (ODSP) (Carrington 2023b). The ODSP includes Saudi Arabia’s ‘biggest organisations, such as the $700 bn Public Investment Fund, the world’s largest oil company, [Saudi] Aramco, the petrochemicals firm Sabic, and the government’s most important ministries’ (Carrington 2023b).

This demonstrates once more how the construction of sustainability impacts the level of analysis and demands for accounting. The isolated achievement of the net zero target, from a mainstream perspective, would likely be considered ‘sustainable’ while from a holistic perspective one would problematise the connections and interrelationships between political, economic, social and environmental dimensions. Söderbaum and Brown (2010) distinguish between the interpretation of sustainable development as a demand for ‘social and ecological modernization’ in the case of the former, and for ‘more radical changes in the political-economic system’ in the case of the latter (181). Taking pluralism seriously is to acknowledge that both interpretations can be correct in their own terms and that disagreement between the groups might not be resolved. The aim of pluralism is not to work towards consensus at all cost rather to accept the plurality of perspectives.

In this section I, have argued that the hegemonic discourse of sustainability as a matter of technological innovation has been leading to increased resource extraction. I have highlighted that the mainstream discourse of sustainability, which tends to focus on individual performance indicators does not generally connect these to the social inequalities caused (or fuelled by) resource extractivism. Next, I will connect sustainability to gender equality.

Sustainability and Gender (in-)Equality

In 2022 alone, 184 women and girls were killed in acts of violence in Canada (and has been increasing over the years) (Dawson, Zecha, and Angus 2023). Living in Canada as a white woman, I am less likely to be killed in an act of violence. The data availability on this matter is still not adequate but even with this in mind (i.e. at a minimum), about ‘one in five victims killed by male accused was an Indigenous woman or girl (19%)’ (Dawson, Zecha, and Angus 2023, 6).

Gender equality is one of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals and one of twelve social foundations (i.e. the inner limits) in Kate Raworth’s circular doughnut economic model. The social foundations can be interpreted as the minimum social standard for people to live well (Raworth 2017).

In their sustainability report, the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals elaborates their position in relation to all UN Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG5 Gender Equality, providing information about their targets, measurements and performance. Female students were admitted into KFUPM’s graduate programmes for the first time in the 2019/2020 academic year, and into their undergraduate programmes in the 2021/2022 academic year. The university is working towards increasing female-male ratios in student populations, academic faculty, staff and leadership positions. Their sustainability report has identified ‘[t]he empowerment of women and the creation of equal opportunities [as] two of the main goals of KFUPM’s transformation’ (KFUPM-Sustainability n.d.). This transformation is aligned with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, according to which women’s empowerment has also been formulated as one of the ‘top priorities of social reform’ (Vision 2030). Efforts towards achieving gender equality have been applauded internationally (UN ESCWA 2019).

Many of the positive reforms have been targeted towards improving equal chances for women to enter and succeed in the workforce, for instance better access to education, accessing financial services, the right to drive, etc. Certain industries have allowed access for women employees for the first time, for instance, security services for the interior ministry, departments of criminal investigation, aviation, air traffic control, cinema production, or military, among others (GAFT 2019). At the same time, it has been criticised that ‘Saudi Arabia’s Personal Status Law fails to respect women’s agency in making crucial decisions about their lives and the lives of their children and perpetuates discrimination against them’ (Amnesty International 2023). Among the main concerns are that the law ‘codifies some of the practices inherent in the male guardianship system, fails to adequately protect women from domestic violence, and entrenches a system of gender-based discrimination in marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance’ (Amnesty International 2023).

Saudi Arabian activists who demand gender equality risk being arrested and put into prison (Fahim 2018; Parker 2019). In 2018, in a continuous attempt to silence feminist movements, many

prominent activists in the movement were arrested: Loujain al-Hathloul, Azizah al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan, Ibrahim al-Modaymeegh, Mohammad al-Rabeah, and later on, Nouf Abdulaziz, Mayya al-Zahrani, Hatoon al-Fassi, Nassima al-Sadah, and Samar Badawi. Many more were summoned, interrogated, and put under travel ban. (al-Shehri 2019)

Angela Davis has highlighted throughout her work that (143) that

intimate violence [incl. all forms of domestic violence, sexual violence, sexual harassment and sexual assault] is not unconnected to state violence. Where do perpetrators of intimate violence learn how to engage in the practices of violence? Who teaches them that violence is okay? (…) Racist and sexual violence are practices that are not only tolerated but explicitly – or if not explicitly, then implicitly – encouraged. When these modes of violence are recognized – and they are often hidden and rendered invisible – they are most often the most dramatic examples of structural exclusion and discrimination.

She continues by saying that ‘the greatest challenge facing us as we attempt to forge international solidarities and connections across national borders is an understanding of what feminists often call “intersectionality”. Not so much intersectionality of identities, but intersectionality of struggles' (Davis 2016, 143).

A complexity of interrelated concerns is showcased in Mlak al-Shehri & Nasir M.’s (2019) viewpoint ‘The Feminist Movement in Saudi Arabia’. In their article, al-Shehri & M. highlight that the narratives of a ‘pre-Islamist’ Saudi Arabia and a ‘pre-oil’ Saudi Arabia are tightly interwoven, and hence, inseparable (Appendix 1 provides a lengthy quotation from al-Shehri & M. work to more fully exemplify their views on this matter). They highlight that the country (and its gender hierarchies) went through a major transformation during the 1930s and 1940s when oil production started. In fact, the AAA conference location, Dhahran, is where ‘in 1935, an American company called Standard Oil drilled the first commercially viable oil well and later established the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO)’ (AAA n.d.). Throughout the 1970s, Saudi Arabia increased ownership shares, until it was fully government owned in 1980. Later in the 1980s it established Saudi Aramco, which is now one of the world’s largest companies (Aramco, n.d.). Saudi Aramco is a member of the oil demand sustainability programme (ODSP), which I have mentioned earlier. It also is the ‘sole owner of North America’s largest single-site crude oil refinery at Port Arthur, Texas’ (Aramco, n.d.). Saudi Aramco has recently caught media attention due to the UN investigation for possible human rights violations related to ‘fossil-fuel induced climate change’ (Schartzkopff 2023). I have already alluded to the disproportionate negative impacts on poor and racialised communities and women. The contextualisation of gender, race, capitalism and resource extraction in Saudi Arabia allows us to draw connections back to Canada and explicate joint struggles through different histories and present manifestations:

Of course, our histories are intertwined with one another’s. If we read these (unfinished) histories alongside the works of Glen Coulthard, Patrick Wolfe, and Jodi Byrd on genocide, settler colonialism, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands in the service of capital and white settlement, it is clear that Black and Indigenous peoples, to the Europeans and their settler societies, existed along a spectrum of non- or hardly-human entities, utilized, alongside minerals, monocrops and livestock, as racialized and gendered assemblages to be funnelled toward building a white (settler) vision of a future society in which our people’s respective survival was an afterthought. Put otherwise, the massive destruction, gendered and murderous, of (Indigenous) human life and land dispossession; the commodification, exploitation and fungibility of (Black) human life; and the relentless expropriation and destruction of non-human nature are inextricably linked: a disregard for all living things except for their value as property to be accumulated. (Robyn Maynard in Maynard and Simpson 2022, 23–24)

The hegemonic discourse fails to make visible the various dimensions of exploitation of the bodies, lands and minds (Lauwo 2018). Simpson (2017) is helping us more deeply grasp the symbolic power of gender-based violence in the capitalist extractivist system:

Colonizers want land, but Indigenous bodies forming nations are in the way because they have strong attachment to land and because they replicate Indigeneity. All Indigenous genders as political orders also replicate Indigenous nationhood, but the colonizers are looking through the eyes of heteropatriarchy so they see Indigenous women’s and girl’s bodies as the bodies that reproduce nations, and they see 2SQ [Two Spirit and queer]¹⁹ bodies as the biggest threat to their assimilation and dispossession project. (…) During times of violent conflict, sexual and gender-based violence is widely recognized as a tactic of both war and genocide because it is frequently used as “a military tactic to harm, humiliate and shame” and because violence and war weaken systems of “protection, security and justice.” Sexual violence is an effective colonial tool in genocide and dispossession because the damage it causes to families is so overwhelming that it makes it very difficult to have the emotional capital to continue to resist.

In this section, I have outlined a connection between resource extraction and gender (in-)equality, as one of the social dimensions of sustainability. Next, I will come back to my question: What does it mean to take pluralism seriously in the context of sustainability?

Taking pluralism seriously is to recognise irresolvable differences between groups and to set up processes which allow for these differences to be fully acknowledged and expressed (Dillard & Brown, 2014, p 82). In the case of the AAA’s conference on Accounting, Governance and Sustainability that would mean to put processes in place which allow for and encourage a plurality of views and expressions of sustainability contexts. In this sense, the AAA conference could provide an opportunity for joint and deliberate reflections on how to assess sustainability in a complex system of globalised extractivism. From this perspective, it might then be more meaningful (in a planetary sense) to discuss the role of the individual organisation.

Another opportunity (among many others, of course) is the 2024 CSEAR North America conference in Texas, the world’s largest crude oil producer according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA 2023). During the conference, deliberate efforts could be made to explore the gendered, racialised and class-based context of resource extraction and what that would mean for sustainability. In the next section, I will focus on the creation of plural spaces by imagining otherwise.

Imagining Otherwise

Women in Saudi Arabia (and elsewhere) have built solidarity and mobilised for change. One of the various ways in which women in Saudi Arabia do that is through so-called ‘silent’ activism (Alkhaled 2021): through the lever of entrepreneurship, women are creating safe spaces for other women within their businesses in which they can co-construct a feminist understanding and allow other women to experience a role outside the traditional view. This works towards building confidence and empowerment.

Learning from this and other initiatives, we can be inspired to identify collective struggles and start to imagine jointly how to mobilise our own work as accounting academics in the process of dis-articulation and re-articulation. Through our work, we can bring to the fore ways in which various institutions are complicit in normalising and hence perpetuating injustices which legitimise the status quo (Apostol 2015; Catchpowle and Smyth 2016).

The AAA conference on Accounting, Governance and Sustainability can deliberately work towards sparking discussions on sustainability that emphasise, rather than exclude, the histories and contexts in which social injustices take place. For instance, use of shadow accounts could be encouraged (Apostol 2015; Dey 2003; Rodrigue and Laine 2022), the creation of possibilities to express solidarity with Saudi women and transgender people or the strengthening of the global efforts towards gender equality. In this sense, promoting plurality of thought rather than a monolithic vision of accounting (Brown 2009; Söderbaum and Brown 2010) can better work towards envisioning an accounting for planetary sustainability beyond extractivism.

Furthermore, collective efforts can made by the organisers to create safe spaces in which dimensions of social justice – human rights, gender equality, economic equality, among others – can be discussed or otherwise expressed during the conference, for instance through art or poetry. Mouffe (2013, 88) expresses the potential of artistic and cultural practices to ‘offer spaces for resistance that undermine the social imaginery necessary for capitalist reproduction’. She also emphasises their role in agonistic interventions, which is to say that they can also become neutralised by the hegemonic discourse.

The AAA and its members can collaborate with Saudi Arabian researchers to unpack communalities of struggles and potentially use critical research (for instance, addressed towards North American context) as a vehicle to also challenge the global hegemonic discourse through. The conference can use the space collectively to imagine otherwise and in the spirit of plurality avoid the Othering of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals.

All this is, of course, under the premise that the AAA does take pluralism seriously. As alluded in Yves’ original commentary, the alliance between the AAA and KFUPM did send an odd signal and I agree with Yves that it would be interesting to learn what happened in the backstage of this arrangement.

Concluding Remarks

In this paper, I have explored the question what it means to take pluralism seriously in the context of the AAA organising the first conference on Accounting, Governance and Sustainability in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in alliance with the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. I have investigated sustainability as contested concept and explored it from an agonistic feminist lens. I have contrasted the demands for accounting based on the mainstream corporate-centred perspective and the alternative systems-based (embedded) perspective. Sustainability in the former case would be understood as something that can be measured in terms of individual performance indicators, while the latter would take into consideration the interconnectedness of struggles on various dimensions such as race, gender and others. It is therefore more complex to assess the contribution of an individual organisation or industry towards sustainability. This analysis allows the reader and members of different accounting research communities to reflect on the frontiers of ‘we’ and ‘they’ in this context, and to experience how these might change over the course of reading the paper. Through analysing various dimensions of sustainability, I have encouraged the creation of new spaces beyond the initial ‘we’ and ‘they’. The AAA and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals are also encouraged to deliberately co-create spaces to actively promote a plurality of thoughts in which some of the aspects raised in this comment could be explored further.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 At the time of writing the conference has been postponed to December 2024 ‘due to the travel advisory warning issued by the US Department of State in relation to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East’ (AAA n.d.).

2 Yves briefly mentions his concern regarding gender inequality in Saudi Arabia in a footnote. However, without formulating the link between the struggles, this concern seemed too far outside the main issue he raised.

3 In 1970, weapons she had owned were involved in a courthouse takeover aimed at freeing three Black prisoners. Although Davis was not present at the court and stated that she did not know about the event at the time, she was charged with kidnapping, murder and conspiracy. She was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List. She went underground but got caught and imprisoned for over sixteen months. She claimed innocence in all charges and gained global support. In 1972, the all-white court pledged her to be found not guilty on all three charges (Mejias-Rentas 2023).

4 Davis states, ‘it makes no sense to imagine eradicating anti-Black racism without also eradicating anti-Muslim racism’ (Davis 2016, 48). Lorde (2007) makes a similar point.

5 Despite the continuous inspiration provided by Black feminists, their work still remains vastly under-acknowledged even within feminist literature (see for instance hooks 1994, 2014; Lorde 2007; Olufemi 2020).

6 A large portion of mainstream accounting research on sustainability is concerned with measurement of incremental corporate performance on isolated social or environmental indicators and its relationship to financial performance. It subscribes to the notion that the increase and maximisation of financial capital is desirable. I therefore understand it to be (in general) a part of the larger hegemonic capitalist discourse.

7 Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler (2008) characterise four types of the business case: (i) cost and risk reduction, (ii) competitive advantage, (iii) reputation and legitimacy, and (iv) synergistic value creation. See also Schaltegger and Burritt (2018).

8 This notion of corporate-centered incremental performance is also reflected in the international sustainability standards, for instance those issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), see for instance Cooper, Romi, and Senkl (2022) for a critique of the ISSB and Cooper et al. (2023) for a discussion of the Canadian context. Open letters by members of the CSEAR community have criticised the ISSB approach to sustainability reporting (Adams et al. 2020; Cho et al. 2022).

9 It is then debatable whether there is a notable difference of corporate sustainability from corporate social responsibility (see for instance McWilliams and Siegel 2003; Margolis and Walsh 2003; Waddock and Graves 1997, among others) in the sense that it focuses either on isolated actions or indicators that go beyond the traditional set of (financial) accounts, for instance, energy usage, carbon emissions, employee turnover, release of toxic chemicals into air, water or land, etc. (see for instance, Ott and Schiemann 2023; Clarkson et al. 2008; Cormier and Magnan 2015). In fact, the concepts are often lumped together (e.g. Christensen, Hail, and Leuz 2021; Dinh, Husman, and Melloni 2023).

10 I acknowledge that CSEAR members (just like AAA members) are not a homogenous group. For those engaged in more critical (or alternative) accounting research, sustainability requires a critical engagement with the planet’s carrying capacity and therefore with its boundaries (Sobkowiak, Senn, and Vollmer 2023; Dey and Russell 2014). This work directly or indirectly connects with what Raworth (2017) calls the ecological ceiling and the social foundation. It requires a holistic approach, an acknowledgement of the complexity of an interrelated, interdependent system.

11 Davis highlights that the isolated depiction of heroic figures such as Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr works to make invisible the efforts of many people who have worked collectively and over long periods of time to achieve social change. This act of individualisation therefore reduces the perceived power and agency of the masses.

12 In terms of the agonistic thought, alliances which connect ‘interested parties who articulate the contested issue in the action space, i.e. got together around the meanings of the key signifiers that form the political frontier’ (Dillard, Shivji, and Bianchi 2023) are called chains of equivalents (George, Brown, and Dillard 2023; Tanima, Brown, and Hopper 2024).

13 A similar point has been made by Robyn Maynard when she writes that

the currency of the concept of a universal ‘we’ (…) has always been a violent exclusion relying on who is a historical subject, who is considered a full human, a national citizen, with Black and Indigenous communities, of course, written out of the very boundaries of the concept. It’s perhaps the final insult that you and I, our respective communities, only enter, exceedingly belatedly and only abstractly and contingently, into the universal ‘we’ once it is time to identify the architects of the climate disaster, only to disappear from it again in the next headline, though, etc. (Maynard and Simpson 2022, 19)

14 Mouffe refers to Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony through neutralization’ or ‘passive revolution.’

15 In accounting, see for instance Cooper (2015).

16 Laclau and Mouffe (2014) are therefore talking about the hegemonic struggle as the back and forth of creativity of people and capitalism.

17 It is worth emphasising that the various demands within a chain of equivalences might be in conflict with each other. They do not automatically converge and therefore need to be expressed politically (Mouffe 2013, 74). The ‘recognition of the constitutive character of social division and eradicability of antagonism’ is what Mouffe (2013, 18) calls the moment of the political.

18 Among CSEAR members, in particular those who would identify as critical or alternative accounting researchers.

19 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson includes the following context in footnote 8 on page 255 of the cited book: “I am using Two Spirit and queer (2SQ) as an umbrella term in this book to refer to all Indigenous Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, and gender-nonconforming people. See http://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/ for more information. Hunt writes,

‘Two-Spirit is used by some Indigenous people to describe the diverse roles and identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans and/or gender-fluid Indigenous people in North America. At the 1990 Winnipeg gathering of the International Gathering of American Indian and First Nations Gays and Lesbians, ‘Two-Spirit’ was chosen as a term to move away from the anthropological term ‘berdache’ in describing Native queer identities and communities. Following this usage, and that of some recent Two-Spirit scholarship, I choose to capitalise this term’; ‘Witnessing the Colonialscape,’ xv. I include the term queer in 2SQ to recognise that not all Indigenous queer people use the term Two Spirit to identify themselves. Lesbian elder Ma-Nee Chacaby presents a different understanding of the term Two Spirit (…).”

Appendix 1

The quote below brings to the fore the complexity of global struggles and hence the need to analyse them holistically. To provide the full richness of their analysis, I have decided to include the section ‘Date Palms, Oil Rigs, Gender and Color Lines’ of al-Shehri & M.’s (2019) viewpoint on ‘The Feminist Movement in Saudi Arabia’ in its entirety:

Elderly Saudi women’s narratives of ‘pre-oil’ Saudi Arabia are inseparable from their narratives of ‘pre-Islamist’ Saudi Arabia. To some, this is a story of disempowerment and repression; to others, it is one of religious enlightenment and social mobility. Between those two poles a multitude of narratives exists, depending on which specific transformations affect each woman in her respective community, and their specific attitudes towards them.

Gender relations in pre-oil Saudi communities varied significantly. There were urban, rural agricultural, feudal, (iḳṭaʿai) sedentary, tribal, and non-tribal communities under different forms of rule. This variety in social formations meant a variety in gender relations as well. What they all had in common, however, was laboring class women’s involvement in non-domestic labor.

Besides teaching, medicine, small trades, and crafts, women also took part in farming. They did not do so, however, on a basis of parity. Women were limited to specific tasks in date palm farming, for example: “The man was on top of the date palm, the woman below,” picking from the ground whatever falls from atop, as one woman described it. In other words, not only were women restricted from specific fields of labor, they were even limited to specific tasks in those they partook in.

Major transformations started in the 1930s and 40s with the advent of oil production under direct American corporate management, which was central to the Saudi state-building project. After decades of intensifying date commodity production for export to Western markets, the deteriorating conditions of the peasantry in nearby oases in eastern Saudi Arabia provided an abundant supply of cheap labor for American oil corporations. In this American-managed oil labor market and the expanding Saudi state bureaucracy, women were completely excluded.

But the Americans’ imposition of Jim Crow practices, the color line, and hyper-exploitation of what they referred to as “native” labor, sparked decades-long labor struggles, led by Arab nationalists and communists. These labor struggles advocated, among other things, for the nationalization of the oil industry; the abolition of slavery, ending segregationist practices; women’s education; and instituting labor and political rights, including calls for drafting a constitution and introducing an elected parliament with full legislative powers. While some of those efforts were successful, others not so much. The color line was eventually (at least nominally) abolished, but the newly-introduced gender lines remained in place despite some challenges from the labor movement.

Throughout the following decades, as wages increased as a result of antiracist struggles and increasing oil prices, imported commodities sidelined local crafts and trades, and agricultural work became less fruitful, women were practically ejected from virtually all spheres of non-domestic labor. A single-breadwinner household was largely instituted.

With the institution of girls’ education, the black ‘abaya was instituted as the nation-wide, state-enforced dress code for women. For the longest time and in most of what became Saudi communities, the black “abaya used to be largely the dress of upper-class women, who, unlike toiling women, lived mostly in seclusion’”.