The Politics of Suspension: Transnational Governance Without Resolution in Environmental Accounting

As planetary risks come to be recognised as threats to global financial stability, environmental accounting—the methods through which corporations disclose their ecological impacts—has evolved into an issue of significant importance in transnational governance and global markets. Yet after decades of scholarly debates, regulatory intervention, and corporate implementation, this issue remains highly contested and largely unresolved. Critical scholarship has warned of the increasing role of accounting, corporate, and financial actors in diluting the original pluralist vision and transformative potential of environmental accounting. This thesis revises the terms of critique in interdisciplinary accounting research by interrogating the frictions, practices, and processes through which elite actors exercise control over the global standardisation of environmental accounting, since the 2010s. In a rapidly evolving regulatory context, marked by disruptions and uncertainty, their authority is neither inevitable nor unchallenged and their engagement is deeply ambivalent. Theoretically, I draw on field theory as a socio-spatial construct and sensitising concept to interrogate relational power struggles over meanings and positions. In addition, I mobilise literature in political economy and economic sociology attuned to the complexities of global power dynamics and elite agency in transnational settings. Methodologically, I adopt a relational-processual, case-oriented, and qualitative approach operationalised through document analysis, semi-structured interviews, field observations, and career data.
The politics of suspension describes a process of governance in which elite actors assert control by keeping transnational issues—here, environmental accounting—in a state of non-resolution. This process is theorised across four empirical research papers, each of which highlights a key dynamic of suspension as elite actors (1) sustain the appearance of progress while deferring commitments to specific trajectories; (2) manage tensions through temporary settlements; (3) perpetuate efforts toward professional closure; and finally, (4) facilitate the strategic repurposing of transnational templates of governance across contexts. Building on this framework, I argue that the global standardisation of environmental accounting produces contradictions that elite actors cannot resolve without questioning, and ultimately, undermining the conceptual, institutional and professional foundations that sustain their authority—and the ontological premises of accounting itself. As a result, these actors default to suspension to signal engagement and contain dissent while forestalling meaningful action. Suspension as control is thus symptomatic of a governance system unable to reconcile its own logics with the demands of ecological survival. These conclusions open new analytical pathways for understanding the dynamics of international accounting regulation, the ‘paralysis’ of global climate politics, and transnational governance more broadly.