Accounting polycentricity in Africa: Framing an ‘accounting and development’ research agenda

Abstract

This paper reviews the accounting literature on Africa development using the notion of polycentricity. The revived debates on accounting in developing countries indicate the need to link accounting and development, which implies that the accounting literature neglects the elements to do so. We question this starting from two points of reasoning. First, the exclusion of scholarly contributions from less developed countries in the international academic debates has been widely acknowledged. Second, over recent years, numerous contributions on organizational and accounting issues have appeared, but are too fragmented to constitute a coherent academic and intellectual corpus. Our review draws on 171 papers on accounting research on Africa in 33 accounting journals over the past four decades, utilizing an accounting and development research framework of polycentricity, which has two major features: actors intervening at three analytical levels (constitutive, collective, and operational) and their actions, to identify areas that may sustain the growing momentum of accounting and development research.