Accountability, closeness and environmental transparency

Renée Palmer, Andrea Brunt and Glen Lehman

Chapter 15 in Handbook of Critical Environmental Accountability and Sustainability, 2026, pp 218-232 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The art of interpretation explores the speciousness of humanity's ontological commitments to the natural world. The outlook entwines human agency with the natural world, contributing to moral theory. Stephen K. White's (2017) work on admirable citizens and weak ontology challenges the dominant discourse of business as applied to environmental accounting, sustainability research, and modernity. White's arguments are developed in this chapter, exploring a more robust ontological realism that connects people with the cosmos, environment and geist. The authors argue that the limits of science and transcendental philosophy entail that Nature cannot be conceived as a specific object or a totality of objects in the world but only as the ontological ground of phenomenal manifestation. An environmental ontology reveals how naturalism and scientific language are limited in explaining the natural world. Interpretation is a form of hermeneutic realism that offers an anti-naturalist philosophy of human sciences, thus necessitating moral argument. This suggests developing multiple and conditional narratives that explore realist and totalising explanations of the hegemonic claims of business movements in sustainability and sustainable development.

Keywords: Environmental And Social Accounting; Critical Theory; Agonistic Accountability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781802201765
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