Future-proofing accounting education: Educating for complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is causing the largest disruption of the post-war era (McCalman, 2020; Snowden, 2020). It is changing the way human populations live and work across the planet, representing significant uncertainty. The pandemic is placing pressure on our economies, health systems, and global mobility (Giordano, 2020). It is transforming the way we interact with each other, our systems of local and global governance, and how we consume and value resources. The global pandemic is demonstrating how integrated our social and ecological systems are and is questioning the role we play in managing them. In short, the past year and a half is calling for us to adopt a systems perspective of the world, with redesigned models of accountability and governance that enable us to withstand the varied ecological, sociological and economic challenges of the coming decades. But is this pressure really new? It seems it has been building up for some time. External factors, such as climate change, sustainability, food security, the future of work, technological innovation, political instability, refugee migration, and the over-consumption of resources all represent systemic economic, ecological, and sociological factors that place pressure on current business models, including the accounting profession and their models of accountability and governance. These systemic factors have led to the development of systems approaches of accountability such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) non-financial measure indicators, Natural Capital Protocol, Social and Human Capital Protocol, and Integrated Reporting that all call for the balancing and integration of multiple ecological, social, and economic resources. These future-oriented, integrated systems of governance and accountability seek to develop futureproof approaches to define, measure, account for and mediate value. This in turn is forcing the accounting