Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Jane Gleeson-White, Allen & Unwin, $24.99.
It’s all about capitalism, climate change and the accounting revolution that can save the planet. There’s been years of discussions tackling the problems that bedevil contemporary accounting.
Gleeson-White was particularly intrigued by the conception of ‘six capitals’: financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship and natural capital.
Now comes this revised edition of Six Capitals, a timely version of the revolution that’s going on in the world of economics and accounting.
Internationally acclaimed commentator on economics and sustainability, Gleeson-White, says the issue is ultimately about value: accounting is the way we define and measure value and translate it into numbers and money, ‘metrics’.
“And ‘value’ is a very fuzzy, ill-defined concept in a world where traditional religious belief systems no longer determine collective values as they once did, and monetary and so-called market value have taken their place as the apparently overarching global schema. I cannot overstate the power and significance of our much-overlooked accounting systems — nor the need for change and for these difficult conversations to continue.”
Six Capitals tells the story of ‘four emerging movements designed to value people and the planet: the push for a new corporation legally bound to benefit society and the environment while making a profit; multi-capital accounting to value society and nature as well as profit; ecosystem accounting for nations; and the rights of nature movement, which resonates with indigenous earth-centred laws and cultures’.
In recent years the problems of contemporary capitalism have become painfully obvious: horrendous fires, floods, droughts, species extinctions, ecosystem collapse – and now a pandemic shutting down the globe.
What is clear in ‘these dark days is that the wellbeing of human communities and the natural world is the greatest possible good. We now need to bed this knowledge into our economies, into our accounting, financial and legal systems and into our policymaking’.
