Workshop on Transformative Accountability

3 June 2026 | Northumbria University, Newcastle

In an era of democratic backsliding, rising misinformation, and deepening inequalities, traditional models of accountability are proving inadequate. This workshop creates space for critical engagement with transformative accountability as an emergent, situated practice that empowers citizens, builds relational power, and reconfigures unjust systems.

About the Workshop

While accounting scholarship has long highlighted how dominant accountability regimes can narrow democratic participation and reinforce existing power relations, recent work has pointed to the transformative potential of alternative forms of accountability. These include dialogic, feminist, decolonial, environmental and movement-based approaches that foreground relational power, collective agency and lived experience.

Transformation is viewed as dynamic and contested, not a fixed end-state. The workshop welcome work that examines ongoing struggles, partial steps, and prefigurative practices. This workshop aims to launch a connected special issue with Financial Accountability and Management.

Find more details on the PDF below:

Transformative accountability workshop call for papers.pdf

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Event details

Date: 3 June 2026

Time: 9:30am - 5:00pm

Location: Northumbria University - Newcastle City Campus

Refreshments: Lunch and refreshments provided

Key Themes & How to Submit

Indicative research article's themes include:

● Conceptualising transformative accountability: beyond compliance with traditional practices and criticism of alternatives - what makes accountability transformative?

● Accountability beyond principal-agent focus: mutual, collective and relational forms, where stakeholders have assumed accountability and created shared stewardship

● Research engaging in citizens-led accountability, including, for example community organising, social movements, campaigns, coalitions and assemblies as sites of transformative accountability

● Prefiguration and the struggle for transformation: How do alternative accountability practices engage in prefigurative practices and politics?

● Relational accountability as transformative – How do dialogic and participatory practices foster transformative accountability?

● Methodologies for engaged, messy research: including approaches to ethics of care, positionality, co-production in research and navigating risk and harm in such research

● Explorations of how disclosures are interpreted, mobilised or re-appropriated by communities and movements

Different levels and scales of transformation, from the individual to the systematic or structural and the mechanisms that enable transformative accountability at different levels?

● Decolonial, feminist and environmental perspectives that challenge coloniality and neoliberal logics in accountability

● Pedagogies of transformative accountability and transformative learning

● Consequences and limits: when transformative accountability backfires or become performative

● Academic engagement - How can researchers move beyond critique to co-creation of transformative accountability practices? Explorations of the ways that we as academics can engage in impactful and transformative forms of accountability.

Alongside conventional research articles the workshop actively welcome:

● Methodological notes and reflective essays on engaged, participatory research (including challenges, failures and non-linear pathways)

● Practice notes and co-authored pieces with community organisers, activists or practitioners

● Counter accounts

● Short interventions, letter from the field, ongoing struggles

● Explorative visual methods of presenting the research

Please send your document (2000 words maximum) by 6 April 2026 to Rebecca Warren at rebecca2.warren@northumbria.ac.uk. Please indicate your name, status and affiliation in your submission.