Against new humanitarian management: Prefigurative accounting in the humanitarian field
研究无国界医生如何通过会计实践抵制效率至上、财务问责和管理主义的新人道主义管理，提出预象会计概念，强调组织内部实践应先行体现其倡导的外部变革。
This paper studies one large humanitarian NGO, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). We argue that its accounting practices can act as a ‘prefiguration’ of the organisational practices it wants to promote more widely. Precisely, the organisation is critical of what we call a ‘new humanitarian management’, which we characterise through three interconnected dimensions – a performance model that promotes efficiency and standardised projects, increasingly financial, upward accountability, and managerialised norms and values. We therefore detail how MSF responds to this trend with a performance model that rejects commensurability and disembeddedness, an alternative form of accountability framed around (self-)criticism, and strong normative controls aiming at encouraging humanitarian entrepreneurship. These alternative practices suggest that organisations promoting emancipation externally should start by shaping their internal processes and controls to offer ‘moments of prefiguration’. We therefore contribute to the literature on alternative accounts and emancipatory accounting by discussing the possibilities of what we call ‘prefigurative accounting’.