The political life of mitigation: from carbon accounting to agrarian counter-accounts

This article seeks to stimulate analysis of how accounting knowledge, techniques, and practices work to incorporate agriculture and land use into climate mitigation. Accounting plays a significant role in the ways that capitalism inserts itself into, reworks, or reorganises agrarian webs of life. To study these processes, we train our critical gaze on accounting itself - its epistemic foundations, instruments, and narratives, and their implications for agrarian livelihoods and relations. Through the notion of "agrarian counter-accounts," we conclude by considering the potential of altnerative methodologies and understandings of account-giving, taking, and holding in struggles for agrarian climate justice.