Accountability in the Anthropocene: Activating responsible agents of reform or futile finger-pointing?

Abstract

Confronted by intersecting ecological and social crises associated with the rise of the Anthropocene, architects of global environmental governance have often attempted to harness accountability claims to single out the individual or organisational actors contributing most significantly to these crises and pressure them to uphold responsibilities to society and the planet. Yet critics have cautioned against excessive reliance on individualised accountabilities as means of tackling planetary crises, given the constrained ability of such approaches to lead the large-scale transformations required to redirect anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change. This article adapts agent-centered approaches to accountability to address such critiques. It is first argued that agent-centered accountability is an important element in broader efforts to support systemic change, helping to identify responsible powerholders, redefine normative standards of responsibility and empower advocates of strengthened global environmental governance to demand compliance with expanded responsibilities. However to take seriously the distinctive demands of large-scale institutional change, such approaches need to be: (a) differentiated in ways that account for the contrasting roles of different individual and organisational actors within de-centred accountability systems; (b) materially extended in ways that enable agents to be held more effectively to account for their contributions to collective social and political processes; and (c) discursively challenged in ways that resist discursive efforts to present individualised accountabilities as substitutes for more radical and large-scale institutional interventions. The article's argument is elaborated and illustrated through exploration of problems and practices of accountability associated with the contested governance of global production systems.