Transparency and accountability for the global good? The UK’s implementation of EU law requiring country-by-country reporting of payments to governments by extractives

We draw upon the critical accounting literature to theorise what we see here as an accounting mobilisation and functioning in context. The manifestation entails ostensibly a progressive transparency and accountability and merits critical attention vis-à-vis concerns to better link accounting with the common good. We here find Gallhofer et al. (2015) and Gallhofer and Haslam (2017), with their appreciation of ‘emancipatory’ dimensions of accounting and how accounting can become ‘more (or less) emancipatory’, a useful framing, especially if, informed by critical studies that have problematised dimensions of transparency and accountability systems, their notions of the complex and multifaceted ambivalence of accounting systems are elaborated more explicitly vis-à-vis transparency and accountability. We focus upon the UK’s implementation of Chapter 10 of the EU’s Accounting Directive (and the equivalent Transparency Directive provisions), which is ostensibly progressive legislation prescribing Reports on Payments to Governments. Our empirical study indicates both progressive and problematic dimensions of the accounting and its dynamics in context, extending theoretical appreciation including for praxis.