Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ) is the official Journal of The Centre for Social and Environmental Accounting Research. It is a predominantly refereed Journal committed to the creation of a new academic literature in the broad field of social, environmental and sustainable development accounting, accountability, reporting and auditing. The Journal provides a forum for a wide range of different forms of academic and academic-related communications whose aim is to balance honesty and scholarly rigour with directness, clarity, policy-relevance and novelty.
SEAJ welcomes all contributions that fulfil the criteria of the journal, including empirical papers, review papers and essays, manuscripts reporting or proposing engagement, commentaries and polemics, and reviews of articles or books. A key feature of SEAJ is that papers are shorter than the word length typically anticipated in academic journals in the social sciences. A clearer breakdown of the proposed word length for each type of paper in SEAJ can be found here.
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This special issue aims to explore the potential of accounting and accountability in advancing sustainable cities and their communities in line with SDG 11.
SDG 11 focuses on “sustainable cities and communities,” aspiring to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” (UN, 2025). While SDG 11 addresses urban sustainability, it is acknowledged that progress toward this goal is critical to the achievement of almost all other SDGs (UN-Habitat, 2020). However, the predominantly top-down orientation of the SDG framework has been criticised (Sobkowiak et al, 2020). A consequence of this in the context of SDG 11 is that the capacity of local communities to inform and transform citizen behaviour, generate and share local knowledge, and support the evolution of co-productive and participative spaces has been overlooked (Bilsky et al., 2021). Therefore, the focus of this special issue is on understanding howaccounting and accountability can mobilise local capacities to support a just and transformative transition towards the achievement of SDG 11 that centres community voices.
Accounting research has the potential to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018) whilst the importance of accounting in the management and governance of cities has also been recognised (Lapsley et al., 2010). With respect to cities, accounting and accountability’s relationship with innovative city-wide re-imaginings such as doughnut cities, smart cities and circular cities has been considered (e.g., Bekier and Perisi, 2023). Furthermore, accounting and accountability’s role in local and participatory solutions, for example in participatory budgeting, has attracted the attention of accounting scholars (e.g., Jayasinghe et al., 2020). Nevertheless, such initiatives require further attention in line with the significant challenges facing cities including conflicts between diverse actors, limited voice for marginalised groups and a lack of accountability to communities. While accounting and accountability tools such as counter accounting (Thomson et al., 2015; Shu et al., 2025), emancipatory accounting (Gallhofer and Haslam, 2003) and dialogic accounting and accountability (Bebbington et al., 2007) offer potential to provide solutions to some of these challenges, the relationship between sustainable development, cities, accounting and accountability warrants further critical investigation.
Based on this, we suggest that possible areas to explore include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How can diverse theoretical, methodological, and empirical approaches enrich our understanding of accounting and accountability’s role in advancing sustainable cities and communities?
- What accounting and accountability mechanisms are mobilised in cities to adapt SDG implementation to unique local contexts and ensure sustainable outcomes for diverse communities within cities?
- What is the role of accounting and accountability in co-productive and participative spaces which enhance the role that communities play in achieving sustainable outcomes?
- To what extent can emancipatory accounting and accountability approaches be used to shift power from city elites to marginalised communities in the pursuit of the achievement of sustainable cities and communities?
- How do conflicts within cities impede the achievement of sustainability goals, and can accounting and accountability mechanisms intervene to mediate or resolve such conflicts?
We invite researchers to submit research papers, essays, commentaries, and any other innovative research outputs to explore these questions.
Submission
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with Social and Environmental Accountability Journal’s editorial policy and style guide and submitted by 31 December 2026 via the Journal’s online submission system. Please select the 'special issue' option and indicate in your cover letter that your manuscript is in consideration for this special issue. All submissions will first be screened by the Special Issue Guest Editors, in collaboration with SEAJ Joint Editors, to determine their fit with the scope of the special issue and of the journal.
For queries and further details, please contact Darren Jubb (DJubb001@dundee.ac.uk).
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LoginSEAJ has a lively reviews section, which provides an important forum for academic discussion. We publish article reviews, book reviews and thematic reviews. Thematic reviews generally cover 3 or 4 recent papers on a similar topic. Our reviews section includes recent articles, books and themes that may be typical to SEAJ readership, but we also hope to introduce readers to articles, books and themes that may be novel to them. We accept proposals for reviews from authors at any stage of their career.
Find out more about the reviews on the aims and scope page.
This special issue invited authors to consider diversity and inclusion, with studies that focus on exploring the role of accounting, accountants and the accounting profession.
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The Reg Mathews Memorial Prize is an annual award for the paper considered to have made the most significant contribution towards the social and environmental accounting literature published in Social and Environmental Accountability Journal ( SEAJ). The paper is selected by the Editorial Board of SEAJ and is named in memory of Professor Reg Mathews, a leading figure in the development of social and environmental accounting. The award was established in 2013, and first awarded for papers published in 2012.
Professor Reg Mathews was one of social accounting’s earliest and most influential pioneers. An academic for most of his life, he was a prolific author and an exceptionally generous colleague. His influence on the emerging field of social accounting was manifest equally in his tireless support of new academics and in his important papers on such matters as education, approaches to practice and state-of-the-art reviews of the subject. He was the founding joint editor of Social Accounting Monitor, which paved the way for the international CSEAR community and which developed over time into what we now know as Social and Environmental Accountability Journal.
The CSEAR community honoured Reg with a Festchrift entitled Social Accounting, Mega Accounting and Beyond in 2007 and it is entirely fitting that his inestimable contribution be remembered in this annual prize. Reg passed away in 2012 after a long illness.
Learn more about previous prize winners.
About the Prize
