This paper examines accounting practices and the environment
before ‘the market turn’ of the 1990s. By exploring
a particular case in the history of accounting and the
environment, the emergence of and the practices of a
calculative regime in relation to the pollution issue in
post-war Norway, I seek to explore the questions outlined
above.1 The more general question I then address is how
governing by numbers can fail to work for the environment,
and produce non-authority rather than an authoritative office.
At the same time, I seek to understand the conditions
under which numbers nevertheless come to have effects.
Although I would certainly not reject the possibility of generalizability
(Napier, 2006), the purpose of this paper is not
to suggest any clear-cut universal answers or to list key conditions
that must be in place for numbers to work in public
administration. Rather, the purpose is, through a detailed
study of a single historical case, an archive study, to open
up a space where the above issues can be explored in greater
detail than they often are in the scholarly discussion. The
space that I seek to open up is a relational space. Let me
say a few words about this before proceeding.