Accountability in the environmental crisis: From microsocial practices to moral orders

Abstract

The global environmental crisis is the result of a complex web of causation and distributed agency, where not even the most powerful individual actors can be considered responsible nor remedy the situation alone. This has prompted multiple calls across societies for transformative social change. What role can accountability play in this context? Starting in the theoretical traditions of microsociology and pragmatic sociology, this article elaborates the role of accountability in social interactions. To provide an account that justifies an action or inaction is here understood as a process of social ordering, where accounts are assessed as acceptable only after they have been tested against higher normative principles. Microsocial practices are, in this way, linked to macrosocial order. The following section turns to the global environmental crisis, showing that the crisis raises normative as well as epistemic challenges. The complexity of the socio-environmental situation makes it hard to know what should be done and opens normative orders and epistemic claims to contestation. This situation provides increased opportunities for strategic maneuvering to justify actions as well as opportunities to question social practices and social order. The article concludes by discussing the role of accountability in climate change. Accountability can serve as a mechanism to attach issues to the current environmental crisis and re-embed decisions and practice in an environmental moral order. As part of a broader palette of instruments, rules and norms, accountability has an important function to play in transforming society towards sustainability.