Diane-Laure Arjaliès PhD

Winner of Best Paper Contest – Category: Established Scholar

Diane-Laure Arjaliès has been an Assistant Professor at the Ivey Business School since 2015. She belongs to the ‘Managerial Accounting and Control’, ‘Sustainability’ and ‘General Management’ groups – a cross-disciplinary appointment that reflects her research and teaching. Diane-Laure’s aim is to push the boundaries of knowledge and practice by investigating the latest social innovations in finance and accounting. Over the past decade, she has studied the emergence of responsible investing, conservation finance, impact assessment, integrated reporting, and alternative currencies. Her research investigates how the fashioning of new devices and/or collective actions can help transform markets towards sustainability. Ethnographer by training, Diane-Laure enjoys doing field research and sharing her experience with students and practitioners. Before working at Ivey, she was an Assistant Professor at HEC Paris in the Department of Accounting and Control. Prior to academic life, she worked for several years as an analyst in an asset management company and as a social economy manager in a mutual insurance company. Diane-Laure will be presenting her paper: Can Accounting(s) Save Nature(s)? The case of Endangered Species. 

The co-author of the paper is: 

Delphine Gibassier, Birmingham Business School, Lloyds Banking Group Centre for Responsible Business, University of Birmingham (Birmingham, United Kingdom) 

Abstract:

This study examines one of the first performance indices developed by conservationists to assess their effectiveness at saving endangered species. The article demonstrates that conservationists used the performance index to select the species to be saved. This selection, however, eventually led to transform species into investments that had to show a return, relative to the efforts put forward by the conservationists to save them. The article demonstrates that the financialization work of conservationists is an outcome of the penetration of humankind into the Anthropocene, and the adoption of The Economy as the default mode for governing societies. Although conservationists described this move as a collective failure, they nevertheless praised financialization work, that they believed provided a way to re-connect humans to nature(s). The article discusses the implications of such findings for accounting, conservation science and the protection of biodiversity. The article is based on an in-depth study of the conservation organization that created the performance index, 53 interviews with conservationists and conservation finance specialists, conservation fieldwork and secondary evidence.

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