Four priorities for new links between conservation science and accounting research

Engagement with diverse social science disciplines is essential to revealing political, social, and institutional challenges that must be addressed to advance effective biodiversity conservation (Bennett et al. 2017; Teel et al. 2018). One challenge that remains insufficiently investigated is frustration with the lack of impact of innovative information tools and systems of accounts aimed at motivating and guiding ecosystem management. The conservation community invests considerable efforts in their creation and experimentation. However, ecosystem-based tools do not always lead to the changes in decision, action, or policy conser- vation scientists expect (e.g., Ruckelshaus et al. 2015). Often, the inability of such information systems to gen- erate expected changes is not due to technical limitations rather than the too fragile articulation between their de- sign and the complex realities of developing strategies and organizing management of ecosystems in a diversity of contexts. Investigating such articulation between an information system and the organizational details of its systematic use is precisely what characterizes an aca- demic field: accounting, which belongs to management as a discipline and often intersects with social sciences or economics.