Hot off the press, the latest issue of Social & Environmental Accountability Journal includes original research articles, commentaries, tributes and reviews for CSEAR members and the wider sustainability accounting research community. As joint editors, we would like to thank all those who have contributed to the latest issue, including the reviews editors team, Mercy Denedo, Nicolas Garcia-Torea and Matthew Scobie, for their hard work on this important section of the journal. Our thanks also go to the contributors to the reviews section, whose engagement with the literature of our field is central to the development of this section of the journal.

A variety of approaches and theories can be found in the research articles of this issue, all somehow related to issues of accountability:

• Sumarwan, Luke, and Furneaux examine how credit unions approach accountability to governments in Indonesia. They highlight how such social enterprises informally engage in demonstrating accountability and maintaining legitimacy, simultaneously contributing to shape the context affecting the unions and their members.
• Poiohia, Moerman and Perkiss draw upon critical geopolitics to explore how Australia accounts for its overseas development aid to the Solomon Islands. They show how the aid programme plays a key role in securing political interests in the Pacific and unmask a geopolitical tug-of-war in the government’s discourse.
• Maama, Appiah and Doorasamy reveal how Ghanian companies insufficiently report on what social and environmental issues minority stakeholders (local community, employees, and small shareholders) deem material, thereby underlining the accountability shortcomings of the firms’ reporting practices.

Both commentaries in this issue raise important issues in our field and related practices:

• Dey and Russell bring to the fore the issue of academic travel’s contribution to the climate crisis and highlight some recent and inspiring low-carbon scholarship initiatives. Taking stock of the international nature of the CSEAR network, they challenge the CSEAR community to reflect further on ways to reinvent our own scholarship practices.
• Apostol raises the issue of corruption and explores the state of the (anti-)corruption literature in our field. She invites us to embrace the study of corruption and, among other things, emphasises the need to explore the matter in light of local contextualities.

We devote a section of our editorial to Cornelia Beck’s – Conny, as our community best knows her – commitment to the development of the reviews section of the journal. Conny passed away at this time of the year last year. Part of the original formal review editors team incepted in 2007, she stayed with the journal until 2015. This section of our editorial reflects on her commitment to the reviews section of the journal through her care and engagement with authors and co-reviews editors. For us, Conny “was a great scholar who put her talent, intellect, and hard work to the benefit of SEAJ for an incredibly long time. We are immensely grateful for the time, energy, care, and passion she invested in shaping the reviews section of the journal.”  Beyond SEAJ, Conny was also greatly involved in the sustainability accounting academic community. This is brilliantly evoked by Jane Andrews in her tribute to Conny in the journal’s pages. Jane does a wonderful job of remembering Conny as scholar and a person. We thank her sincerely for delineating Conny’s contribution to our community so vividly.

Our editorial also addresses an important, but delicate, subject. We humbly endeavour to revisit the distinctive orientation of the aims and scope of the journal, as it is of central importance to the existence of SEAJ as a scholarly outlet. In particular, we try to provide further guidance to prospective authors on SEAJ’s commitment to the creation of a new academic literature. We place this issue very much in the context of the evolution of our field, which has moved further away from the disclosure-related studies which were initially dominant. At the same time, SEAJ has been at the forefront of establishing new priorities for our field, including the recent agenda-setting “SEAJ2020 and beyond” special issue. This leads us to revisit both the type of work that may not fit within SEAJ’s aims and scope anymore, while at the same time encouraging a broad array of research questions and approaches that will support and nourish the development of our field in light with the journal’s aims and scope. Ultimately, “we believe focusing on innovative and transformative work is how SEAJ will stay true to its aims and scope and will continue to strive for the creation of a new literature. We invite submitting authors to be bold, to dare, to challenge, to take us into unchartered areas.” Prospective authors are welcome to refer to our editorial for more details and we are happy to engage with them for any inquiry (seaj[at]st-andrews.ac.uk).

Enjoy our latest issue!