“The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our wine.” José Martí’s line from Nuestra América is the right opening for this Black Paper because it states the core political principle in plain terms: institutions must be built from the realities of our own societies, not enforced from external powers. Decolonial accounting begins from that principle. It treats accounting as both revolution and self-determining and asks who defines value, who sets measurement rules, and who decides the terms of market entry.
An earlier post, “Jiangxi Trade: How the EU co-opts BRICS without joining it” addresses the theme of Section 5 that includes my summaries of how the EU-Mercosur and EU-India FTA is harmonized with the SDG-SNA-SEEA environmental accounting integration. In a later chapter, the Black Paper also includes the CPTPP, and considers the alternative: the RCEP, and the BRICS “CGETI” paper (Contact Group on Economic and Trade Issues). (Abbreviation guide and links to key texts are annexed).
This Black Paper argues that accounting systems are not neutral statistical instruments, but rather the very foundation of governance infrastructure.
Through standards, reporting protocols, audit chains, and compliance interfaces, accounting intermediaries shape access to finance, trade, and development policy. In practice, this means that the control over metrics is a control over sovereignty, creating conditions of exclusion that will perpetuate unfair development access.
When these accounting and auditing rules are applied to environmental data and metrics, it means that our environments are authored elsewhere and enforced through validation monopolies. In this new data environment, there is little space to develop local markets, transfers, or exchanges resulting in multi trillion dollar markets that will make it inaccessible to communities.
These multi-trillion valuation claims are likely to be intermediated by the same large financial firms that dominate government bond markets through index construction, fund management, custody, and risk analytics. I am not claiming debt drives natural capital valuation. I am noting that both numbers are so astronomically large they function politically. They make new governance systems feel inevitable, and they privilege the institutions that already control measurement, compliance, and capital access.
A decolonial accounting program therefore sets a concrete objective: restore policy sovereignty over valuation, data custodianship, and verification pathways so that they are accessible to people, to “uncles and aunties” networks in communities. Environmental and social data generated in the Global South should not be treated as unattainable raw input for external rent extraction. It should be governed through local-custody rules, Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), public-interest verification, and enforceable benefit-sharing. Interoperability remains necessary, but it must be negotiated on reciprocal terms, with community and state authority.
How Revolution Unfolds
Decolonize accounting is urgent. Accounting rules function as instruments of geopolitical management, and these rules converge as a stack of the largest institutional gatekeepers to market access: auditors, index providers, rating agencies, and asset managers. (Annex 1)
National accounts were initially organized to coordinate state production, employment, and planning across imports, exports, and transport. Over time, the richest countries (OECD) repurposed them into a hegemonic system of standards and thresholds that restrict market access, guarding the gate of development gains.
The problem persists through each major transition of the modern order which is described in the Black Paper. Postwar institutions standardized metrics and linked them to development finance, trade access, and macroeconomic conditionality. Security-state expansion after September 11 fused the treatment of military accounts with compliance administration across finance, borders, and data systems. The 2008 crisis accelerated concentration in Assets Under Management and strengthened private intermediary control through ratings, audit, and verification chains. The post-COVID cycle then extended these dynamics through platformized governance, digital infrastructures, and intensified dependence on externally authored technical standards. The language may change from crisis to crisis, but the asymmetry expands becoming more disparate, more uneven, and more inaccessible for most.
Under this largely globalized system, global crisis reorganizes economic power, and Global South economies are often playing catch up to conform to these rules. The revolution is not to take over and control these rules, like the American revolution which swapped authority for a new colonial or capitalist order, but to develop new structures of economic engagement as China’s revolution did, reordering the accounting matrix under their national accounting system.
For example, under Mao-era MPS (Material Product System) planning, Chinese statistical work tracked ‘social purchasing power’ as a balance category, a way to measure that financial demands could be brought to the consumer-goods market and to keep it aligned with available supplies for community households. That is a different accounting priority than the SNA’s growth-first aggregates, and it shows how different systems in the accounting matrix can be reordered providing both stability and legitimacy rather than only prioritizing commodity market valuation. (Chen. p.88)
The current harmonization wave under the institutionalization of global rule making deepens this structural continuity. SDG reporting, SNA revisions, environmental-economic accounting, and trade-linked due-diligence regimes are increasingly integrated in ways that condition market access on externally legible data production. This creates a new compliance terrain where producers and states must continually prove conformity through costly intermediary systems they do not govern. The distributional outcome is predictable. Large firms with certification capacity and financial actors with data-securitization capability gain leverage. Small producers, indigenous and customary stewards, and fiscally constrained states absorb costs and exclusion.
This Black Paper responds to this specific historical condition. While it may appear to reject standards or cooperation. It is more of a program to relocate authority over valuation, data custodianship, verification, and remedy so that interoperability does not require us to surrender our jurisdiction. Without a clear understanding of this shift, harmonization will continue to reproduce colonial hierarchy under technical language. The purpose of this Black Paper is to promote an accounting program that can be redirected toward ecological restoration, social reproduction, and sovereign development.
It is an urgent intervention because harmonization is accelerating to meet the 2030 Development Agenda. With only a short time remaining, state-backed investment regimes are already using technical compliance language to ramp up and hardwire new control mechanisms into trade administration. But that is more than enough time to say no, or wait, and enough time to propose alternatives.
Behind the paywall is a condensed Section 1, index, and background, treating accounting as an institutional power, testing each governance layer with four questions: who sets the rules, verifies compliance, captures rents, and bears most of the adjustment costs to the SDG-SNA-SEEA nexus.
