Search results

This paper aims to identify thematic issues in public sector accrual accounting and financial reporting that learn from the past and provide lessons for the future by reflecting on the warnings in Olson et al.’s seminal 1998 book Global Warning.

Methodologically, this paper takes insights developed by an experienced pool of public sector accounting scholars and refines them via frames of thinking such as accountability, democracy, decision-making and governance. The discussion follows a medical analogy of an organ transplant in which the public sector was diagnosed as an ailing patient and a for-profit accounting system (business accrual accounting and reporting) has been transplanted to it as a cure. We discuss the relation of accrual accounting as a tool of neoliberal policies in the health sector (diagnosis ailment and organ transplant), technical issues regarding accrual accounting and those implementing it (technology of the transplanted organ) and the effects of that accounting on the public sector (the progress of the patient after the transplant).

From the topics and examples addressed, we conclude that the transplantation of business accounting and reporting to the public sector carries wider implications for large-scale accounting change and requires vigilance. Transplanting to new fields of accounting technology that is itself undergoing constant change may be more problematic and challenging than previously recognized.

Critical challenge and assessment of whether Global Warning’s concerns are still valid today and whether the public sector faces new “warnings” regarding its accounting and reporting.

This paper aims to document a novel course titled Harm Reduction Design Studio. The course introduced the harm reduction problem space to design students for designing objects, social worlds, infrastructures and ecologies that shape human and nonhuman social interactions within them.

Extending tenets drawn from social movements for harm reduction from the focus on drugs and habits begins the reparative work of undoing past harms, living well in the present and reducing future harms. This course introduces history, theory and practice of harm reduction in relation to health, well-being, social connection and safety.

The course was piloted from August to December 2024 in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, USA.

Society-wide implications for mainstreaming harm reduction are far-reaching. For instance, the U.S. National Science Foundation has recently called for ways to “incorporate ethical, social, safety, and security considerations” into research design to mitigate potential harms of scientific research and amplify societal benefits. This course prepares students to think upfront about incorporating harm reduction into the design of technological artifacts.

This course presents a replicable model for bringing harm reduction and design pedagogy together in the shared spirit of encouraging the readership of Drugs, Habits and Social Policy to widen participation in design practice.