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or, killing the cook who tried to poison our local data stewards

When we think about restoration or environmental and community health data, intermediaries are the services that sit between the data and the markets. Finance systems and policy frameworks help to assign value to intermediaries. Every step in that chain carries costs: storage costs, security costs, verification costs, compliance costs, enforcement costs… The people who work those functions — the local staff at a data hub, the auditor who confirms a fishery baseline, the technician who maintains a community broadband node, the elder who validates a consent protocol — those are local paychecks. They walk and breathe as the material substance of a community data economy. The value of environmental and community health data is ultimately determined by who controls those intermediary functions and who captures the income they generate. When that control sits outside the community, the compliance chain extracts. When it sits inside the community, it enriches. This is the overall benefit when we discuss intermediaries as being integral to a nation’s economic health.

In my earlier Black Paper, I elaborate upon why compliance regimes should be challenged and I would argue that if not for— or in spite of —the miasma of the current geopolitics over oil shipments, extraction, and the petrodollar, the harmonization of the SDG-SNA-SEEA accounting frameworks are already advancing beneath our nation’s noses, to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

The reason to approach this harmonization carefully are the numbers. One hundred trillion is an unnatural number. Consider that a Nature study estimated that there are about 3 trillion trees on earth; or that the human body contains about 37 trillion cells; or the brain has 86 billion neurons— sure there are phenomenon that are larger, like ants on earth, stars in the observable universe, grains of sand, or molecules of water— but the fact that government/public debt is about $100 trillion, and private debt is over $151 trillion, and the World Bank’s estimate of the value of Natural Capital also exceeds $100 trillion, those are the kinds of numbers that should give one pause, particularly when the global median consumption of 8 billion people is roughly $10 a day.

In this harmonization, Natural capital is valued at almost exactly equal to total global public debt, the lion’s share of which is owed by OECD countries. ACP nations — Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific — hold only about 4 percent of that debt while the OECD hold around 84% (led by the U.S. at $39 trillion). Now consider that the combined land and ocean territory of the ACP is larger than the entire OECD, and just imagine if the SDG-SNA-SEEA harmonization becomes the framework through which ACP environmental data is governed and valued, we will then be looking at a transfer of ecological wealth out of the regions that steward it, and into the accounting systems of the institutions that hold the debt. That is not simply a technical adjustment, we’d be looking at a global accounting theft that would have been as unbelievable as Palestine’s genocide being broadcast live in realtime for three years and counting. Under the shroud of Palestine, Sudan, Epstein, ICE, Venezuela, and Iran, it would be a shame for any ACP or South oriented government to even consider continuing to trust an environmental data management program coming from Washington, Wall St., Silicon Valley, Brussels, or Geneva, particularly when the opportunity to create our own intermediaries are now available. If this seems to be too abstract of a point, consider how much data resources would be extracted if the Global South adopts the IMF, World Bank, or OECD data compliance facilities.

What follows are just three intermediary categories that any restoration or community health data program would require, three programs that would ensure that our environmental data resources would remain within our communities, nations, and regions. As discussed in the previous posting, China’s brand new World Data Organization provides a counterweight against any possible OECD backdoor compliance theft. But once again, to be clear, I could be, like Bruno Schultz, speaking from a Sanitarium under the sign of an hourglass…

Data Custody and Verification

Before any environmental or community health dataset can enter a market, financing system, or policy framework, someone must hold it, authenticate it, and confirm that the consent conditions under which it was collected remain intact. In the current compliance architecture, this function is performed by externally accredited auditing firms, platform providers, and certification bodies whose standards are set in Geneva, Brussels, or Washington.

The cost of that accreditation is passed to communities as a condition of market participation. A community-governed data custody system — organized around local protocols of verification, with, for example, hōʻoia or verification as its operating principle — performs the same function at a fraction of the cost, keeps the income local, and ensures that FPIC (free, prior, and informed consent) is not a one-time procedural event but a continuously verifiable condition embedded in the custody chain itself.

China’s oldest merchant traditions understood this as well: the verification of weight, measure, and moral obligation (shu or reciprocity) was a community function before it was a state function, and the li of Confucian market governance placed reciprocity at the center of that verification, not as an ethical addition but as its operational foundation (Confucius 15:24). And 4000 years ago in India, in Book 4 of the Arthashastra, in “the removal of thorns” section, Kautilya constructed an entire administrative apparatus around the principles of exchange and the punishment of cheats, frauds, and predators, ensuring that the integrity of measurement remains a public good.

Ecological Storage and Distribution

Restoration data has physical correlates. A fishpond restoration program generates not only ecological monitoring data but harvests, seeds, materials, and biological stocks that must be stored, distributed, and accounted for across community networks. The infrastructure that performs this function — cold storage, seed banks, community warehouses, distribution logistics — is also a compliance infrastructure. It is where the chain of custody for ecological data becomes material and verifiable. When this infrastructure is externally owned or financed through debt instruments designed by multilateral development banks, the compliance terms attached to the financing reproduce the same dependency that the data extraction problem creates. Communities that have historically governed commons storage — loko i’a, the fishpond systems of Hawaiʻi, the communal crop, seed, and grain networks across Pasifika and elsewhere, the collective storage traditions that Polynesian voyaging culture required across open ocean trade routes — already hold the governance logic for this infrastructure. The voyaging record is relevant here not as metaphor but as material evidence: translocal exchange across a Pasifika liquid continent required distributed storage, distributed verification of cargo and obligation, and distributed enforcement of protocol and reciprocity across networks that operated without any of the centralized compliance infrastructure that the IMF or World Bank now presents as a precondition of development finance. The killing the cook metaphor in the subtitle is the allegorical lesson of Captain Cook.

Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 was not simply a violent encounter, it was the enforcement of protocol. The accounts suggest it followed a breach of reciprocity, a violation of the exchange obligations that governed the relationship between his crew and the community. The Hawaiians were not reacting to a stranger. They were enforcing the terms of a relationship that Cook’s side had broken. That is kiaʻi in its most material form, the guarding and stewarding of authority when the compliance chain is violated.

The poetic weight could be read as one of the most sophisticated translocal exchange network in human history, one that had operated across millions of square kilometers of open ocean for centuries without a central bank, a clearinghouse, or an IMF structural adjustment program, enforced its own compliance through exactly the distributed protocol and reciprocity infrastructure this article describes. And the man whose arrival marked the beginning of the systematic destruction of that entire governance system died because he violated its terms.

What colonialism wrought was not an absence of governance. It was a governance system that needed no Geneva, no Washington, and no Lloyds of London to function and that is precisely why it had to be destroyed.

Community Clearing and Accounting

Every exchange of data, ecological goods, restoration credits, of labor, requires a system that records what moved, between whom, under what terms, and what obligations remain outstanding. In Western financial architecture, this function belongs to banks, clearinghouses, and accounting firms whose accreditation, reporting standards, and dispute resolution mechanisms are governed externally. The cost of accessing those systems is a structural barrier that keeps community exchange subordinated to centralized financial infrastructure. A community clearing system governed through local accounting protocols — helu in the Hawaiian sense, the disciplined counting that keeps the obligation visible — does not require a bank charter or an IMF program to function. It requires trust infrastructure: shared standards for what counts, shared protocols for verifying that obligations have been met, and shared enforcement mechanisms that communities recognize as legitimate because they derive from their own governance traditions rather than from external accreditation bodies.

In China, in the 3rd-century BCE, Mencius recognized this clearing function as a reciprocity obligation of governance: the ruler who fails to ensure that exchange is balanced and that producers are protected from intermediary capture has failed the fundamental test of legitimate authority (bk III, pt I, ch III).

Everywhere, history reveals that accounting is both a compliance standard and a market standard. And it is one that communities across the Global South, the Pacific, as well as the occupied territories of the largest economies should apply on their own terms without being subjugated to the neocolonial accounting and enforcement regimes in Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Brussels, or Geneva.

The point these three categories make together is simple. We have our own centers. The institutions that perform custody, storage, and clearing functions for community environmental and health data do not need to be built from scratch by external development agencies operating on debt terms. They need to be recognized, resourced, and connected — and they need the compliance frameworks that govern them to begin from community authority rather than from external certification requirements.

The World Data Organization has created the first institutional terrain in which community data governance can claim international recognition without passing through OECD-controlled accreditation systems. The question is whether we will take this opportunity before us. That means asserting our local data epistemologies now, before the standards are set, and build the compliance networks, verification systems, community auditors, and translocal data hubs, harmonizing to reassert our own governance traditions rather than waiting for others to hand them to us.

Institutions do not decolonize themselves. If we are not in the room with our own standards, our own frameworks, and our own demands, the WDO could very well reproduce the same accreditation monopolies under new branding. Updating our governance traditions, the territorial data, and the translocal networks doesn’t mean we go back to brutal enforcement mechanisms, but our work is to build the infrastructure that makes them legible on our own terms.

Simply put, the WDO will assist the global promotion of local data sovereignties while trade regimes and the neocolonial agencies will try to do everything they can to circumvent that from happening. To decolonize accounting means to extricate our data governance from colonial systems.

Previous: Behold! The World Data Organization

*This is the last of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries. Please share and subscribe!

Sequence of the Seashells comes from a proposal written for a workshop in Hawaiʻi, and as part of any decolonial program, utilizes the naming of these events in the language of the locale, in this case,ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.

Not Washington, not Wall St. Not Silicon Valley, not Geneva, not Brussels… Now Beijing will disrupt the West’s data compliance chain!

The World Data Organization was inaugurated on March 30, 2026, in Beijing, making it the first professional international organization dedicated to data development and governance. Its founding membership of more than 200 institutions from over 40 countries — spanning enterprises, universities, think tanks, and financial institutions across 14 industry sectors — marks it as a serious institutional entry into terrain that Western-anchored bodies, from the WTO to the OECD’s tax and digital economy frameworks, have claimed by default rather than by consent.

The WDO is so new that there is not even a website where the Charter is published, and the information that accessed is from translating videos posted on mostly Chinese video sites like Douyin and Bilibili.

The WDO does not seem to be a response to any recent crisis and it is more likely to be an international projection of a domestic policy architecture China has built methodically over the preceding decade. In 2017, Xi Jinping identified data as a new factor of production. By 2020, the Communist Party of China had formally elevated data to the fifth factor of production alongside land, labor, capital, and technology. In 2023, China created the National Data Administration and became the first country to adopt national accounting standards for data assets — allowing companies to record informational holdings on national balance sheets, a step no Western accounting standard-setter had taken. The WDO is therefore the multilateral face of an apparatus that already functions domestically and in which the rules, standards, and institutional logic were not produced through the consensus procedures that govern bodies like the ISO or the ITU, where Western states and their corporate ecosystems have exercised structural influence since the post-war settlement.

The geopolitical logic of the WDO’s timing, however, is propitious. Washington’s deployment of the CHIPS Act and successive rounds of semiconductor export controls has demonstrated that the United States is prepared to use its position in existing multilateral institutions, and its leverage over allied regulatory systems, as instruments of containment. China’s response has been institutional: creating forums in which the United States cannot exercise veto power, and in which the Global South has formal membership rights rather than observer status. The WDO’s charter, while not published, but mentioned in the CCTV report, establishes the organization as a voluntary, non-binding association with equal participation and voting rights across its membership — a structural contrast to the weighted voting arrangements that define Bretton Woods institutions and the governance models of bodies in which OECD members hold disproportionate influence over standard-setting outcomes.

Also, the WDO serves as a counterweight to the accelerating harmonization of the SDG-SNA-SEEA nexus that I discussed in The Black Paper (here or here) — not because it offers a superior accounting standard, but because it introduces a competing institutional venue in which the question of who governs data cannot be answered by reference to OECD statistical consensus alone. The Black Paper’s central finding is that no single binding instrument fuses SDG reporting, SNA revision, and SEEA implementation, but that harmonization proceeds through modular governance shells — indicator metadata, statistical guidance, financing conditions, and trade-regulatory uptake — which together form a compliance stack that concentrates jurisdictional authority over environmental and economic data outside the communities that produce and steward it. That architecture has functioned without serious institutional friction because the bodies that set standards, the bodies that verify compliance, and the bodies that control financing access have been structurally continuous: Geneva, Brussels, Washington, and the multilateral development banks they capitalized. The WDO does not reproduce that continuity. Its Beijing headquarters, its non-binding charter, its equal-voting membership structure, and its explicit mandate to serve Global South capacity-building create the conditions under which an alternative compliance chain — one that begins with community-verified data, FPIC-embedded protocols, and intemerate auditing rather than SNA-compatible classification — can claim institutional recognition rather than remaining a methodological dissent. To be clear, the WDO is not a decolonial institution. It makes it a fault line in the previously seamless surface of global data governance, and it is within this space where decolonial intervention becomes possible.

According to a translation of a WDO informational video on the Chinese website Bilibili:

“Data has been clearly defined as a factor of production, but how it flows across countries, industries, and systems has not yet formed a global consensus. The establishment of WDO is equivalent to building a round table where all parties can sit down on the eve of the possible fall of the digital iron curtain. Jack Perry, chairman of the 48-group of British member units of the World Data Organization, said one thing: worth the quality. Data has no borders, they flow in the cloud, but at the same time, they can also become factors that create barriers, so we must work together. I see China facing the problem. Looking for solutions that make the results of digital economic development more inclusive. So, this organization is not a new government agency under the United Nations, but a digital living room initiated by China and with global participation.”

This is precisely the opening that translocal data markets require. The colonial architecture of global compliance and trade has operated through a specific mechanism: standards produced in Geneva, Brussels, and Washington are presented as universal and technical, obscuring the distributional interests encoded in them. Privacy frameworks like GDPR, data localization rules, and cross-border data flow agreements negotiated through bilateral investment treaties have privileged the compliance cost structures of multinationals headquartered in the Global North. As discussed in Jiangxi trade, they are the multinationals headquartered in Brussels and Geneva that continues to frame Global South’s inability to meet global data compliance standards, blaming their lack of technical resources and expertise rather than acknowledging that the standards themselves were designed without them and work against their interests. The problem gets framed as “they need more training and infrastructure” when the actual problem is that the rules were written by and for someone else.

The WDO’s stated tenet — bridging the data divide, unlocking data’s value, powering the digital economy — registers this exclusion as a problem to be solved, even if the governance model it proposes remains oriented toward digital economy growth and industry consensus rather than toward the FPIC-embedded, sovereignty-grounded data regimes that marginalized communities require.

The opportunity the WDO represents is therefore, realistically conditional. It creates a new institutional venue in which the compliance chain can be contested on a different terrain. And it just so happens that Beijing’s interests in breaking down Western regulatory barriers are aligning with Global South interests in escaping OECD-enforced data governance asymmetry.

Considering what is possible with this new WDO program, we should consider intermediaries to produce equitable outcomes for marginalized communities. While they do not need to depend on the WDO for their legitimacy, they may be able to access the WDO’s institutional architecture as a lever — seeking investment, standards recognition, capacity-building mandates, and working group status — while maintaining the community-verified, independently audited protocols. I will address this in a following post about translocal intermediaries.

Go to next: Translocal Intermediaries
Previous: The in-between space is a Caravanserai

*This is the fourth of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.


The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries.Please share and subscribe!

Imagining translocal data markets and exchange

What I seek to illustrate in these five posts that make up The Sequence of the Seashells* is in all of its pluralities, a reminder that data rules of trade and exchange are vibrant and that we all have the capacity to access the 21st century economy with rules and infrastructure that do not exclude, oppress, enclose, or dispossess us. Translocal data markets are possible, operating like a commons, an in-between space that is structured, accountable, and intermediated.

We should consider that the traditional caravanserai that dominated pre-capitalist trade was truly an in-between space: a hub where goods, information, and trust were exchanged. The caravanserai was so much more than a truck stop off the interstate, it was a place where merchants rested, animals were cared for, news circulated, and credit arrangements were made. The caravanserai existed to make movement safe and reciprocal, combining storage, logistics, and social governance in a single physical site.

Travel Sketches between Empires

Hafiz Abru’s account in his Persian embassy to China, preserved in the Zubdatu’t Tawarikh, gives us a rare ground-level view of this system in operation along the Central Asian routes of the early fifteenth century. Aside from the remarkable and exotic cargo, what the account makes visible is the intermediary infrastructure that made the journey possible at all: the caravanserai keepers, the translators, the local governors who guaranteed safe passage, the provisioning networks that sustained a diplomatic party across thousands of miles of difficult terrain. When the system worked, it did so because every node in the route had an obligation to the next. Reciprocity was a trust network relaying a logistical logic that is relational to one another.

Wilfrid Blunt’s account of the Golden Road to Samarkand and Edward Schafer’s study of the T’ang dynasty’s engagement with foreign goods and peoples in The Golden Peaches of Samarkand together illustrate what this circulation actually produced. The T’ang court’s appetite for Central Asian horses, Sogdian silver, Persian textiles, and the performers and animals that traveled the same routes as merchants attributes political economy as a maintenance of relationships. Schafer meticulously catalogs what arrived in Chang’an. Sure, the peaches, the ostriches, the glass, the music, all the goods of trade, but the real value were the networks that again, like in Hafiz Abru’s account, kept Eurasia in productive contact across languages, religions, and imperial systems that had every reason to be hostile to one another. The caravanserai was the infrastructure that made this possible. It was moral as well as economic. Its value came from maintaining continuity — ensuring that distant communities could trade without continually falling into predation. Even its architecture reflected this ethics: open courtyards for transparency, multiple gates for inclusivity, and rules of hospitality that bound travelers to the host community.

Ibn Khaldun and the Asabiyyah

Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, gives this a theoretical frame that neither the World Bank nor the IMF has yet absorbed. The concept is asabiyyah — a term that resists clean translation but carries the sense of group feeling, social solidarity, the binding force that makes collective action possible across kinship lines, across occupational differences, across the ordinary frictions between metropoles. In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun develops asabiyyah not as a moral ideal but as a material force. It is what allows a group to defend itself, to sustain long-distance trade, to build institutions that outlast any individual member. Without it, dynasties would collapse and economies would cease to circulate. What the caravanserai provided was relational infrastructure — the protocol and reciprocity that allowed asabiyyah to function not only within a community but between them.

Muhsin Mahdi’s 1957 study is important here because he reads Ibn Khaldun as a philosopher of history in the full sense — someone who identified the internal logic by which civilizations generate the conditions of their own demise. For Ibn Khaldun, the problem is not external conquest, even though conquest eventually follows. The problem is what happens to asabiyyah when a civilization reaches the sedentary, urban, palace-building stage of its development. As a systemic thinker, his evaluation of empire is as relevant now as it was seven hundred years ago. He identifies wealth accumulation, the deepening division of labor, and the ruling group’s increasing removal from the reciprocal obligations that originally allowed it to consolidate power. He recognizes that rift when administration replaces solidarity; when mercenary armies replace citizen fighters; when tax collection ignores mutual and general welfare. Each of these conditions may appear individually rational, but collectively they hollow out the social fabric that made the whole structure viable. What remains is a governance empty of the relational content that originally gave it force.

In the opening chapter of one of my favorite novels, Cities of Salt, Abdelrahman Munif captures what Ibn Khaldun theorizes. Before the Americans arrive and before Wadi al-Uyoun is erased, the community’s moral economy is already under pressure from the merchants who pass through it. One of the saltmen addresses it directly: “How can you compare someone who works all year for his wage with another who makes more profit in a single moment.” The saltman is not asking this hypothetically. It is a judgment uttered with contempt. What Munif shows in that first chapter is that the people of Wadi al-Uyoun are not naive about the merchant’s indignation. They see it clearly. They have a moral framework that measures a person by their relationship to labor, land, and the obligations of the community they belong to. There is no lack of moral clarity, but what they do lack is the institutional infrastructure to defend that clarity against the force that is coming for them. The caravanserai, at its best, was the traditional practice, the interaction that slowed exchange down enough for obligation to operate, that made the fast merchant answerable to the slow community. When it disappeared, when the pipeline replaced the courtyard, what Munif’s saltmen knew became indefensible, and nothing remained to enforce it.

Even the Vakatabu…

In 2023, an intervention was held in Fiji among the chiefs, a vakatabu—a recognition that a new development discourse was needed to slow down for renewal and rejuvenation, strengthening the resilience and agency of Pasifika communities.

Slowing down is not a cyclical argument in the fatalistic sense. Ibn Khaldun is not saying that all civilizations will collapse, however, what he identifies is a specific mechanism of decay is the attention to reciprocity — the replacement of obligation-based interactions with accumulation and extraction. The caravanserai, on this reading, is the expression of asabiyyah extended across distance. It makes strangers into temporary members of an obligation network. The merchant arriving from Samarkand and the merchant departing for Tabriz do not need to know each other personally. They need to trust the institution that holds them both accountable to the same rules of hospitality, fair dealing, and mutual protection. That trust is asabiyyah at the infrastructural level — not the exclusionary solidarity of one tribal group against another, but the distributed, procedural solidarity of a commons that works because everyone using it has a stake in its integrity.

The neocolonial postwar economic order

This is what the postwar international economic order dismantled. The Bretton Woods institutions replaced reciprocity and obligation-based transactions with the conditionality regime. The structural adjustment program replaced the caravanserai with the pipeline. Communities that had sustained long-distance exchange through networks of reciprocal obligation for centuries were told that development required submission to a technical compliance system designed elsewhere, administered by specialists, and accountable to creditors rather than to the communities it claimed to serve. Ibn Khaldun would have recognized the pattern without needing the vocabulary of neoliberalism to describe it. The asabiyyah of the Global South was deliberately attenuated — by debt, by enclosure, by the conversion of communal land into collateral, by the replacement of local governance with compliance frameworks obtusely written so that the governed would remain strangers to the rules that bound them.

Restoring translocal data markets is, among other things, a project of restoring asabiyyah at the infrastructural level. Not sentiment. Not nostalgia. The concrete work of rebuilding the intermediary nodes — the clearing systems, the storage cooperatives, the broadband commons, the community insurance pools — through which reciprocal obligation can be made materially effective across distance, across difference, and across the governance gaps that extraction has deliberately widened.

Marx and St. Thomas Aquinas

As to the future, Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, Question XCVII, addresses the conditions under which human law may legitimately change. His answer is carefully structured: law should not change for the sake of change, because the stability of law is itself a social good — people organize their lives around it, and disruption carries a cost even when the new law is better than the old. But law must change when it no longer serves the common good it was designed to protect. What Aquinas is describing, in the language of scholastic theology, is an accountability standard. The law is justified by its relationship to the community it governs and the obligations it upholds. When that relationship breaks down, or when the law serves accumulation rather than the common good, or when compliance regimes become instruments of exclusion rather than frameworks of participation, then the ground for change is right for rebellion, or in the case of compliance, restoration.

Like Aquinas, restoring laws for the common good, Marx also describes in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. When one considers that Marx is really discussing law’s claim to universality against bourgeois interests and greed, what may appear to be revolutionary is simultaneously the most conservative argument available (Marx. 58). In the postwar era, the question of revolution as systemic change has time and again been captured by the same interests it claimed to displace. What presents itself as transformation — the developmental state, the structural adjustment program, the green economy, the digital platform — reproduces wealth accumulation and economic disparity under new administrative language, leaving the population whose security was invoked as justification no closer to the common good that both Aquinas and Marx, from opposite ends of history, understood as the only legitimate ground for law.

While the postwar global supply chains have changed the way we produce, consume, distribute, and value exchange, 21st century data should be seen as the paradigm shift, the great equalizer that can both flatten north-south disparities and provide access for all those who have been largely excluded from economic participation: indigenous peoples; peasant farmers and fisherpeoples; migrant communities displaced by climate or war; the racialized and structurally excluded urban communities.

A language of relationships

If the world does not look like a caravanserai, we should consider that the technical language across all sectors of compliance excludes people — including native English speakers — from participating in what should be as simple as a handshake or a formal greeting on the mat, a kūkākūkā in Hawaiian, or more broadly a Pasifika talanoa. Exclusion is often engineered through language before it is enforced through law. This technical complexity is treated as professionalism or expertise, yet much of what governs economic life is, at its core, an elaboration of basic human agreements: to count honestly, to verify what is true, to honor obligation, and to steward shared responsibility. When these processes are buried beneath inaccessible terminology, communities are taught to believe that governance belongs to specialists and technologists rather than to themselves. Aquinas would recognize this immediately: a law that the community it governs cannot read has already begun to fail its purpose.

Decolonizing accounting therefore begins by translating institutions back into the language of relationships, where economic participation is understood not as submission to technical systems, but as the organized extension of trust, faith, morals, ethics, and virtues. The caravanserai did not require a compliance manual. It required a shared understanding of obligation. That understanding is what we should be restoring— not in stone courtyards along the Silk Road, but in the distributed, community-anchored infrastructure of a translocal data market that the 21st century both demands and makes possible.

go to next Behold! The World Data Organization

previous: The Crusoe Economy

References

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Burns Oates & Washbourne, Ltd. 1947. Question XCVII.

Blunt, Wilfrid. The Golden Road to Samarkand. Hamish Hamilton, 1973.

Hafiz Abru. A Persian Embassy to China: An Extract from Zubdatu’t Tawarikh of Hafiz Abru. Translated by K.M. Maitra, Paragon Book Gallery, 1970.

Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Mahdi, Muhsin. Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History. George Allen and Unwin, 1957.

Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated and edited by Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Munif, Abd al-Rahman. Cities of Salt. Translated by Peter Theroux, Vintage, 1989.

Schafer, Edward H. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. University of California Press, 1963.

*This is the third of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.


The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries.Please share and subscribe!

*A brief about a puritanical simpleton who created a micro-commonwealth of Christian clichés

The following is an excerpt from Manifesting the Liquid Continent, my paper published in the 1st International Conference on Asia Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology, Kunming China, 2019.

Civilization as we have come to understand it, was built the moment we begin to understand the benefits of our division of labor and our understanding of exchange, markets, and supply chains. We gave it those us-and-them names, and also numbers like “many” and “none.” Now those numbers, define the Anthropocene, numbers like 8 billion, which some futurists predict may one day become none if this planet should soon become an uninhabitable wasteland. Totemic identifiers may soon become little more than placeholders establishing legitimacy of an imagined historicism suggesting that to be civilized means to have been found. The seminal political theorist and sociologist Karl Popper writes, “Robinson Crusoe and his isolated individual economy can never be a valuable model of an economy whose problems arise precisely from the interaction of individuals and groups.”[i] And yet, since we have never been as isolated as Daniel Dafoe’s shipwrecked and stranded character, then why should we strive for that insularity. There are some who reimagine the architecture of human space in the natural world, and will willingly leapfrog the millennia of our social evolution back to a solitary social contract dismissing the entire acquired knowledge of the Anthropocene to a pre-totemic place: a tree house on a deserted island.

Yet, the problems that Popper alludes to are “problems” because we are not fictive like Robinson Crusoe living in an island bubble away from cannibals. Our engagement in the world is economic. Whether islands in oceans, or mountain villages, or floating above the earth as in Jonathan Swift’s floating island of Laputa, we have evolved far beyond the historicist’s vision of an origin story. Ours is a story of supply chains. We divide our labor, we engage in exchange. Whether we walk or sail or fly whether we journey or aimlessly drift, the geography of islands, deserts, oceans, and mountains may, to some degree, have determined how natural partitions give boundaries to totems, but the movement of people towards markets of exchange reject the imposed partitions of states and islands and instead recognize oceans, mountains and deserts as merely the spectacle between markets, the interstitial space that would eventually define the breeding ground for military campaigns and conquest and the wastelands of nuclear testing.

It is in the classical political imagination of Euro-American culture that the asymmetrical relationship between main-lands and is-lands evolved, and it was Robinson Crusoe, who Peter Sloterdijk describes as the “puritanical simpleton who created a micro-commonwealth of British Christian clichés,” supplied a “formula for the relationship between self and world in the age of European world-taking.”[ii] The problem is that islands are also mainlands. Dafoe writes, “The savage was now a good Christian,” “we had here the Word of God to read and no farther off from his Spirit to instruct, than if we had been in England.”[iii]

The island of England was the mainland, precisely because of the puritanical self-identifiers that claim rights and property and determine the rules of exchange. Poor Robinson Crusoe left his middle class parentage to become a slave on a ship that was wrecked in a storm. Marooned on an island with savage cannibals, a commerce of which he had no taste for, Crusoe provided no service except for the guns he used to kill the savages and the conversion he applied to subjugate his native man-servant that he called Friday, whose name he never asked. Is it by coincidence, prognostication, or the persistent repetition of religious doctrine that the journals of Capt. Cook’s voyages into the Pacific should reproduce those very same narratives? Is that not the lesson learned from the apotheosis of Capt. Cook, that the self-fulfilling narratives of conquest, imperialism, and civilization are the myths of Christianity?[iv]

And yet these myths persist, invoking the same narrative tropes as if our future could only move forward by rubberstamping its approval of authority. It is the hypocrisy that is maddening. We may self identify as puritans, yet we trade as cannibals, as violent traders that cannibalize markets.

Our economy is predatory and fierce. In the history of the world, there is no greater example of a cannibalistic system than the waning days of neoliberalism when Wall Street’s Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns spectacularly imploded our financial system as investment markets consumed their own debt, hungered for credit default swaps, and feasted on derivatives and debt securities.

The economy of Robinson Crusoe killed the people not the cannibal. The system still remains as we have imposed the capitalist moniker atop every totem of each locale as if the logic of human development evolved to only reach this place, as if this matrix were the zenith of power. Economic historians may one day understand as Foucault has, that “this form of power is salvation-oriented (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty); it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power); it is coextensive and continuous with life; it is linked with a production of truth—the truth of the individual himself.” [v]

How can we approach western geography or the stratifications of trade and commerce seriously, when the basic assumptions continue to privilege a discourse that governs the flow of trade towards a center of power that is neither political, sovereign, nor legal, yet is linked with the production of truth, the manufacturing of consent, and punishes difference and deviancy with tactics of exclusion, obfuscation, and containment?

go to next: The in-between space is a Caravanserai
previous: What is Data

References

[i] Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge. 1997. pp. 8

[ii] * Sloterdijk, Peter. Spheres Volume III: Foams Plural Spherology. Semiotext(e). 2016. pp. 287-88.

[iii] Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Random House. 2001. p. 203.

[iv] Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Cpatain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton University Press. 1992. p.3.

[v] Foucault, Michel. Power. “The Subject and Power.” The New Press. 2000. p.333.

*This is the 2nd of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own ecological and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries.Please share and subscribe!

How our local intermediaries will determine the future value of data.

*This is the first of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own environmental and social data.

The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries.Please share and subscribe!

What Is Data?

Data is and is not a resource. It is not sugar or oil, and the pipeline metaphor that has governed decades of technology policy has done more damage than it has produced insight. Oil is extracted, refined, and burned. Once it is gone, it is gone. Data does not behave this way. Value is accumulated through reciprocity. Data provides access, evidence, and relationships. And yet data is also a resource in the most consequential sense: it can be owned, enclosed, withheld, and weaponized. It can be made to serve accumulation rather than circulation, consolidation rather than equity. The same speck of information that empowers a community to make a land claim can, in the wrong hands, be used to dispossess it. Whether data functions as a commons or as a commodity is not a technical question. It is a question of governance — and governance requires intermediaries.

Long before the ledger, before the coin, before the debt tablet, value moved through reciprocity. The anthropological record is consistent on this: in gift economies, in potlatch systems, in the communal land management of Pacific Island communities, in the seasonal labor exchanges of peasant economies across every continent, value was not accumulated only by extraction, it was accumulated through circulation, obligation, and exchange. The quality and depth of the relationships through which things moved defined principled trust networks.

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss when discussing the hau in Maori exchange, describes the spirit of the gift. What he meant was that the object given carries the giver with it, and the obligation to return is not debt in the modern sense but the maintenance of a living relationship (Mauss 12). Value, on that account, is not a quantity. It is a measure of connection. We have not lost this. It survives in every community that still organizes around stewardship rather than ownership, around reciprocal obligation rather than contract. What a decolonial accounting program proposes should not be nostalgia for a pre-monetary past. It should simply be the recognition that these circuits of reciprocal value never disappeared, but were simply excluded from indigenous accounting ledgers. Restoring them does not require abolishing markets. It requires building the intermediary infrastructure through which reciprocal values can be measured, verified, and made legible to the institutions that currently pretend it does not exist.

Data is an immense speck

Dr. Seuss also understood this before the technologists did. In Horton Hears a Who!, the entire narrative turns on a speck of dust, a particle so small, so apparently inconsequential, that every other creature in the jungle dismisses it as nothing. Horton, the elephant, hears something in it. He hears a whole civilization: the Whos of Whoville, with their mayor and their children and their houses and their particular way of being alive. The speck is not nothing. The speck is everything to the Whos. The problem is not that the Whos lack existence. The problem is that the jungle’s accounting system has no category for them. They are too small to be visible, too distant to be heard, too easy to ignore when more powerful creatures have decided in advance what counts as real.

When we visualize data in all of it’s abstraction, it is difficult to think of it as something greater than a speck. Yet data is not only the abstracted, aggregated, platform-harvested data that fills the ledgers of surveillance capitalism but rather the granular, particular, qualitative signal generated by a community, a household, a mataqali, a fishing village, a displaced family living at the margin of a climate event. They are the sequence of seashells, and if we only see it as miniscule, it is easy to dismiss. In our economic global reality, however, the vehicle through which the 21st century’s relationship with technology is determined, data is precisely how we organize and manage economic systems. Whether it gets heard depends entirely on whether there is a Horton in the system — intermediaries with the structural capacity to listen, to verify, to amplify, and to hold the protocol that says: a person’s interaction is a value, no matter how small.

The standard argument for data markets runs like this: data is the new oil, and whoever controls the pipeline wins. That argument has served the consolidators well. It has not served the Global South. It has not served indigenous communities, peasant economies, displaced peoples, or the climate-vulnerable margins of every region. The pipeline metaphor is itself the problem and we are helplessly watching the unraveling of any genuine global security as it is being driven off a cliff by a handful of billionaire madmen seeking to control oil as if it contained an elixir of life.

Some Intermediary categories

The categories like Cooperative Warehousing and Storage Hubs, Regional Logistics Cooperatives, Digital Market Commons Platforms, Community Clearing and Accounting Systems, Circular Economy Fabrication Centers, Community Broadband and Cloud Infrastructure, Ecological Storage and Distribution Facilities, Health and Care Exchange Platforms, Community Insurance and Risk Pools, and Local Procurement and Fair-Trade Exchanges are not simply sectors. They are intermediary types. Each one is a node in a data market that, if properly constituted, can distribute value across communities rather than extract it upward.

This is the central argument: intermediaries are where value is produced, verified, and retained. Without them, data flows toward consolidation. With them, data becomes the basis for a new kind of infrastructure equity.

The Labor of Data and the Invisibility of Intermediary Work

Standard national accounting treats data as a byproduct of economic activity rather than as a product of labor in its own right. The System of National Accounts — the SNA, the framework that governs how governments measure economic output — records what is transacted. It counts the sale, the contract, the commodity that changes hands. What it does not count is what makes transaction possible in the first place: the verification work, the storage infrastructure, the consent protocols, the local knowledge that had to be translated into a form legible to the system before any of it could be used. This labor is real. It has costs. It has workers. It produces value. None of it appears in GDP.

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting — SEEA — was developed precisely because GDP was recognized as inadequate for measuring ecological and social value. But SEEA inherits the same foundational assumption: value is what can be priced and transacted. Stewardship, reciprocity, and community governance of data and land do not have market prices in the conventional sense, so they remain at the margins of the framework, acknowledged in principle and undervalued in practice.

SDG-SNA-SEEA Harmonization

As preciously described in the Black Paper, the Sustainable Development Goals gesture toward this gap. The 2030 Agenda calls for data disaggregation, for leaving no one behind, for measuring what matters to communities rather than only what matters to markets. But the institutional apparatus through which the SDGs are measured — the harmonization of SDG indicators with the SNA and SEEA frameworks — routes that ambition back through the same accounting logic it was meant to challenge. The result is a system that can tell you the market value of a forest’s timber but not the governance value of the community that has stewarded it for generations.

Stewardship remains, as it has always been, off the books. And yet the intermediary infrastructure through which all of this data moves — the platforms, the clearing systems, the logistics networks, the cloud architecture, the financial instruments that bundle and price data assets — generates some of the largest concentrations of private wealth in human history. That infrastructure is not ungoverned. It is governed very precisely, by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and Geneva, under trade enforcement mechanisms centered in Washington. The communities whose labor, land, and ecological knowledge feed the system are off the books. The infrastructure that monetizes what they generate is not. That asymmetry is not an oversight. It is by design.

Intemerate accounting begins from the opposite premise. Value is not produced at the point of extraction. It is produced and sustained through the chain of stewardship, verification, and intermediation. A Cooperative Warehousing and Storage Hub is not simply a building. It is an accounting node. Every transaction that passes through it — every measurement of food stored, energy used, waste generated, labor contributed — is a data event. That data event has value. The question is who captures it, who verifies it, and who holds the protocol that determines its meaning and for whose benefit.

The intermediary holds the protocol. That is what gives intermediaries their structural importance, and that is why translocal data markets — markets organized around distributed, community-anchored intermediary networks — can produce equity outcomes that platform-based data markets cannot.

Qualitative Value and the Limits of Quantification

One of the persistent failures of natural capital accounting is its insistence that everything must be priced to be counted. Biodiversity offsets. Ecosystem services. Carbon credits. The logic is: if it has a price, the market will protect it. The evidence does not support this. What gets priced is what is already legible to the market. What is already legible to the market is what already belongs to the market’s frame of reference — which is to say, it belongs to the accumulation regime that produced the crisis in the first place.

Intemerate accounting rejects this substitution. Qualitative data — the kind generated by community journals, oral testimony, FPIC protocols, resilience scoring exercises, and participatory observation — is not a degraded form of quantitative data. It is a different register of measurement. It captures what the Variable Data Chart cannot: the texture of reciprocity, the social cost of displacement, the ecological knowledge embedded in a mataqali’s management of its land over generations.

The intermediary’s role here is not to translate qualitative data into a price. It is to hold qualitative data within a governance structure that protects its integrity while making it legible for capital access purposes. Community Clearing and Accounting Systems, Health and Care Exchange Platforms, and Community Insurance and Risk Pools all function in this register. They are not simply financial intermediaries. They are epistemological intermediaries. They mediate between the register of community knowledge and the register of institutional finance, without collapsing the first into the second. And quite simply, they should be benefit the most.

This is the distinction between measurable and non-measurable value that most accounting frameworks refuse to hold.

Protocol and Reciprocity as Accounting Infrastructure

The intermediary categories noted above are not politically neutral. They are constituted by protocols of reciprocity — rules about who contributes, who benefits, who holds the data, and under what conditions it can be used. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is not only a legal obligation. It should be an accounting standard. It defines the terms under which community data enters the market. Without FPIC embedded in the intermediary’s operating protocol, the community data market becomes another extraction mechanism, dressed in cooperative language.

Regional Logistics Cooperatives and Translocal Procurement and Fair-Trade Exchanges are particularly important in this regard, because they operate at the translocal scale where the most important circulation decisions are made. Global supply chains are extractive because they are governed by protocols written at the top of the value chain. Translocal supply chains can be equitable if the protocols are written at the base — in the mataqali, the barrio, the fishing community, the urban informal settlement — and enforced through community clearing systems that make the terms of exchange visible and contestable.

New technologies make this enforceable in ways that were not available twenty years ago. In fact, the brand new World Data Organization, makes this more possible than it was in 2025. Distributed ledger systems, when governed by community protocols rather than by corporate intermediaries, can provide the immutable verification record that auditors need to certify compliance with FPIC and reciprocity standards. Community Broadband and Cloud Infrastructure is the prerequisite: without community-owned connectivity, the benefits of distributed ledger governance flow to the infrastructure owner, not to the community generating the data.

Small Economies, Large Stakes

Pacific Island Countries and Territories — including Hawaii as an occupied Pacific Island — are among the most vulnerable economies in the world to the current configuration of global data markets. Their ecological assets are substantial. Their data sovereignty is minimal. The Pacific Islands Data Hub concept addresses this directly: a regional data architecture governed by Pacific communities, using intemerate accounting standards to establish the value of ecological stewardship, social resilience, and cultural knowledge as assets in climate finance negotiations.

The same logic applies to indigenous communities in the Americas, displaced populations in conflict zones, peasant economies in the Global South, and poor communities everywhere that generate ecological and social value that the current accounting regime treats as externalities. These communities are not data-poor. They are data-rich and governance-poor. The translocal data market, built on intermediary infrastructure is the mechanism through which governance can be rebuilt from the base.

Circular Economy Fabrication Centers and Ecological Storage and Distribution Facilities belong in this analysis because they are where the material economy and the data economy intersect most concretely. A fabrication center that tracks material flows, repair cycles, and waste diversion is generating the granular ecological data that climate finance frameworks claim to need. The question is whether that data feeds into a community clearing system that retains the value locally, or into a platform-based market that extracts it.

Intemerate Accounts and the Transformation of Small Economies

In the original Sequence of the Seashell proposal, we identified a seven-layer compliance chain, each functioning as an intermediary for environmental data governance.

1. Hana ʻikepili — data collection and generation
2. Hoʻoponopono i ka ʻano — data cleaning and classification
3. Hiki ke hahai ʻia ke kumu — traceability to source
4. Hōʻoia ʻia e kekahi ʻaoʻao kūʻokoʻa — independent third-party verification
5. Palapala hōʻoia — certification and documentation
6. Kūpono no ke kālā — financial compliance and eligibility
7. Hoʻoponopono hoʻopaʻapaʻa — dispute resolution and remedy

Kiaʻi puka — the gatekeeper — is the overarching function that governs entry and exit across the whole chain. It serves two purposes. The first is to make visible how OECD compliance chains extract, own, and leverage data value through their own gatekeeping institutions — the standards bodies, the rating agencies, the audit firms, the multilateral lenders — which determine who gets access to capital and on whose terms. The second is to demonstrate that local communities can build their own gatekeeping function: their own access rules, their own compliance standards, their own protocols for determining what enters the chain and what does not. The gatekeeper is not a neutral administrative role. It is where power over data value is actually exercised. The question is whether that power remains under neocolonial governance or in the community.

go to next: 2. Who wants a Crusoe Economy

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls, introduction by Mary Douglas, W.W. Norton, 1990.

Seuss, Dr. Horton Hears a Who! Random House, 1954.

What a technical argument among statisticians from 2003 to 2015 reveals about who gets to count, what gets capitalized, and why Decolonial Accounting is a method towards peace.

In Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Stork, the fox invites the stork to dinner and serves soup in a flat shallow dish — a vessel perfectly suited to a fox’s tongue, while inconvenient for a stork’s long bill. The stork goes hungry. When the stork returns the invitation, the soup arrives in a tall narrow jar that only a beak can reach. The fox goes hungry in turn. Each host has set the terms of the meal, and those terms happen to suit the host.

There is a moment buried in the official record of the System of National Accounts revision process that has this quality. In February 2004, the Advisory Expert Group (AEG) convened to vote on whether warships, tanks, fighter aircraft, and missile systems should be reclassified as fixed assets in national accounts. The proposal passed 15 to 4, with 2 abstentions (Advisory Expert Group, “Decision of the AEG” 1). The United States Bureau of Economic Analysis not only supported the change — it had already implemented it unilaterally, years earlier. What the rest of the world was being asked to adopt, the US government had been quietly practicing since before the debate formally began. The dish had been set out; the question was only whether the other guests would find it nourishing.

The Technical Debate That Was Never Only Technical

The background is worth establishing precisely. The 1993 SNA treated most military hardware — tanks, missiles, warships, aircraft, guns. munitions, etc — as intermediate consumption by the government. This meant that when a government purchased an F-16, the full cost hit the books as spending, not capital formation. The rationale traced back to the post-World War II origins of national accounting: weapons were made to destroy, and the pioneer architects of the system — who had lived through the destruction — treated military operations as external to the economic process. As French national accountant André Vanoli wrote in his February 2004 letter to the ISWGNA, “military operations in war time and by extension military services in general were not considered to be an activity similar to economic activities… What happened internally in the sphere of military activities was judged external to the domain of economic activities” (Vanoli, “Military Expenditures” 1).

Imagine if you’re a shopkeeper on Main Street. When you buy paper bags and cleaning supplies to run the shop day to day, those are expenses — they get used up, they’re gone, they don’t show up on your balance sheet as something you necessarily owns. That’s intermediate consumption: spending that disappears into the cost of doing business. When you purchase a commercial oven that will bake goods for the next fifteen years, that’s a fixed asset — it goes on your balance sheet and depreciates it a little each year, and it counts as part of the shop’s productive wealth. Capital formation is simply the act of adding to that stock of productive assets, which makes your shop look wealthier, more creditworthy, and more economically substantial on paper. Now here’s where the military question bites: under the old SNA rules, when the government produces a warship or guns or bullets, they were treated like the paper bags — spent and gone, intermediate consumption, no lasting asset. Under the SNA 2008 rules, weapons become treated like the commercial oven — a fixed asset, depreciating over decades, adding to measured GDP and government net worth every year it sits in port. The material consequence is that countries with large militaries suddenly have bigger measured economies and stronger-looking balance sheets, not because anything new was produced for citizens, but because the accountants changed which shelf they put the warship on. For countries with small militaries that imports weapons on credit, the same reclassification makes the country look like it has more capital, but the debt to pay for that warship, and the biodiversity that the military and weapons system is degrading don’t even have a shelf at all.

The Canberra II Group, led by Brent Moulton of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, argued that this treatment was conceptually inconsistent and practically problematic. Their case had three main pillars. First, military weapons provide services continuously — including deterrence — and should therefore qualify as fixed assets under the same criteria applied to any other produced asset used repeatedly in production for more than one year. Second, the existing distinction between “destructive” and “dual-use” equipment was difficult to operationalize and created anomalies: an armored vehicle purchased by police was a fixed asset; an identical vehicle purchased by the army was intermediate consumption (Moulton, “Canberra II Group’s Recommendations” [revised 2004] 2). Third, the new International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS 17) already classified specialist military equipment as property, plant, and equipment, and harmonization between public financial accounts and national accounts was a stated priority.

At the April 2003 meeting in Voorburg and the October 2003 meeting in Paris, the Canberra II Group reached near-unanimous agreement on the reclassification. By February 2004, the AEG voted to accept the recommendation. By 2009, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed the SNA 2008, which incorporated military weapons systems into the asset boundary — formally. By 2014, most OECD countries had implemented the new standard (van de Ven, “New Standards for Compiling National Accounts” 2).

What was excluded from the revision shelf was the one thing that could help to balance out military systems: enviromental accounts. The 1993 revision had already been the moment when ecological accounting came closest to the core. Joint UNEP and World Bank workshops through the late 1980s had built enough momentum that environmental and natural resource accounting was an explicit item in the SNA revision process. The resulting 1993 SEEA — the *Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting* — acknowledged directly that its own architects had tried and been turned back: “considering the current state of knowledge on environmental accounting and the divergent views on a number of conceptual and practical issues, it has not been possible to reach an international consensus at this time for a fundamental change in the SNA” (United Nations Statistics Division, *Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting* iii). Ecological accounting was assigned to satellite status — a complement to, not a component of, the central framework. The 1993 SNA itself repeated this architecture, devoting a separate section to environmental satellite accounts while keeping the production boundary intact (United Nations, *System of National Accounts 1993*, chap. XXI). The stork’s jar had been acknowledged, noted, studied, and set aside. By the time the SNA 2008 revision cycle opened a decade later — the same cycle that capitalized tanks and missile systems — the household accounts and wellbeing indicators that had also been raised as serious proposals for the core framework were again routed to supplementary tables and further research agendas. Depletion of natural assets was recorded in the “other changes in volume” account, with no effect on GDP; depreciation of a warship now was. The dish had not changed. The guests who could only use a long-billed jar were told, once more, that the table had been set as fairly as the current state of knowledge allowed.

The Dissenters Identified the Problem Correctly

What makes this archive instructive is not the outcome but the dissent, which was sharper and more structurally aware than the revision literature typically acknowledges.

Vanoli’s intervention was the most systematic. He argued that weapons are not economic assets — they are political assets. Their function, properly understood, is destruction in wartime, and the pre-1993 tradition recognized this by treating military outlays as current expenditure at the moment they arose. The deterrence framing deployed by the Canberra II Group, he argued, obscures rather than clarifies: deterrence is an outcome, not a service, and the analogy with insurance is logically flawed because “defence expenditures in the prevention approach are incurred in order to avoid the risk itself, not to cover the possible losses if prevention fails” (Vanoli, “Military Expenditures” 3). When war actually breaks out, he noted with precision, prevention fails., and that will undermine peacetime accounting models by collapsing them into contradiction. A tank destroyed in combat, under the proposed treatment, becomes an “other change in volume” — an externality — rather than the integral use of the asset for its designed purpose. This, Vanoli concluded, was “a kind of conjuring trick in order not to bear all the consequences of the proposed treatment” (Vanoli, “Military Expenditures” 4).

The Federal Statistical Office of Germany raised a different but equally significant objection: the new treatment would substantially affect both GDP and government net lending/borrowing, and in the context of the European Union’s excessive deficit procedures, this was politically unacceptable as a technical accounting revision (Federal Statistical Office of Germany, “Updating of the SNA-93” 1). Germany’s objection was institutionally motivated, pointing to an unfair national accounting balance sheet that favored high-defense-spending economies.

Fadhil Mahdi of ESCWA, representing developing country perspectives in the expert comment record, was direct: “this proposal did not meet unanimous acceptance from AEG members… military expenditure does not generate tangible production. In addition, these expenditures increase drastically the value of capital formation in developing countries. While the value added generated by the total investment becomes very small especially in the non-producing countries importing the weapons” (Mahdi, in “Expert Comments for Issue: Military Expenditures” 1). This is the structural asymmetry in plain language. A weapons-importing country gets a GDP uplift and a capital formation entry for hardware it did not produce, financed by debt, with no domestic value-added chain behind it.

The Banco de Portugal, in its country comment, accepted the reclassification while noting a different problem: the borderline between fixed assets and inventories was conceptually unstable. Bombs and missiles stored for deterrence, Portugal’s central bank observed, are themselves deterrents — which means “the argument for including military weapons systems in gross fixed capital formation can also be used in relation to expendable durable goods” (Banco de Portugal, “Military Expenditures Comment” 2). This is not a minor technical quibble. It exposes the arbitrary line the Canberra II Group drew between capital and inventory, a line that was ultimately more politically expedient than logically necessary.

Banco de Portugal’s criticism is similar to the fox drawing a line down the middle of the table and calling one side provisions and the other side supplies — insisting the distinction is technical and principled, when its actual function is to determine who eats and who doesn’t. A ballistic missile held in a silo for twenty years as a strategic deterrent meets every criterion the Canberra II Group established for a fixed asset: it is used continuously in the production of defense services, a measurement of national security, it provides ongoing deterrence, and it has a plannable service life. A bomb held in a warehouse for five years waiting to be expended in training meets most of the same criteria. The Canberra II Group resolved this by arguing that deterrence counts, while expendability doesn’t. There is no logic that values lives or environments, it was simply a warmongering beancounter’s convention aligning with the largest defense-spending economies, managing their accounting.

What the GDP Numbers Actually Show

From a macroeconomic perspective, the OECD’s 2015 Statistics Brief shows how the 2008 changes to the SNA altered GDP across the advanced economies, but it does not account for the ongoing downturn or systemic debt that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Across OECD countries, the capitalization of military weapons systems under SNA 2008 began in 2013 and raised GDP levels by an average of 0.3 percentage points (van de Ven, “New Standards” 9). The largest impacts were in Greece (0.6 percentage points) and the United States (0.5 to 0.6 percentage points), the latter noted with the caveat that “military expenditures had already been capitalised in NIPAs” before the international standard caught up (van de Ven, “New Standards,” Table 1, 11). In other words, the US did not change its practice to match the international standard — the international standard changed to match US practice (National Income and Product Accounts is the system that the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis uses, and often—not always— influences the SNA). The stork had already eaten. The question put to the multilateral table was only whether everyone else would accept the jar as the correct vessel.

It should be no surprise, but what the accounting of military systems reveals is that there is an historical pattern of how international statistical standards get made: leading economies, particularly those with large state apparatuses and well-resourced statistical offices, shape norms that smaller, less-resourced, or structurally different economies then absorb as technical requirements. The SNA military asset revision is one instance of a recurring dynamic in which accounting standards, presented as methodological improvements, carry embedded assumptions about what constitutes productive activity, what deserves to be counted as wealth, and whose national balance sheet should look stronger.

The worldwide military expenditure data in the archive gives this additional weight. In 2004, total world military spending was estimated at approximately $1.1 trillion, with the United States alone accounting for $623 billion by FY2008 — more than all other countries combined (World Wide Military Expenditures). The countries at the bottom of that list — Fiji at $36 million, Papua New Guinea at $17 million, East Timor at $4.4 million — are either weapons importers or near-demilitarized Pacific and small island states. Under the SNA 2008 framework, a small island economy that finances weapons imports now records those purchases as capital formation, improving its measured savings and capital stock even as the underlying productive capacity remains unchanged and the debt service accumulates.

This matters directly for Pacific contexts. When Fiji, Samoa, or Tonga record imported military hardware as fixed assets, GDP goes up marginally, measured net saving improves, and government balance sheets appear stronger. What does not appear is the opportunity cost: the healthcare infrastructure not built, the watershed management not funded, the fisheries data system not capitalized, environmental data left on the side of a road. The SNA 2008 expansion of the asset boundary for military systems occurred while ecological assets — forests, fisheries, freshwater systems — remained outside the production boundary entirely, consigned to satellite accounting or are simply unmeasured, waiting for new international standards to absorb that data into their own bureaucratic systems.

The Intemerate Accounting Critique

From the perspective of Intemerate Accounting, the SNA military asset debate illustrates precisely the problem that the Intemerate framework is designed to address. The SNA’s production boundary is does not represent the production strengths of a united nations — it reflects a historically specific set of priorities about what kinds of activity counts as economically productive, what kinds of capital deserve to be depreciated and therefore counted as contributing to output, and what kinds of damage remain invisible in the core accounts.

The military asset reclassification expanded the asset boundary in the direction of state-organized violence while the natural capital boundary remained contested, fragmented, and largely satellite-bound. The UN Statistical Commission endorsed weapon systems as fixed assets in 2009, justifying it against a fictional asset value of national security; it has not endorsed an equivalent mandatory treatment for environmental security: forest depletion, fisheries drawdown, or soil carbon loss. The fox served the meal, and the dish was flat. This asymmetry is neither oversight nor accidental, it was built as a system to reflect which constituencies have the institutional weight to shape international statistical standards, and which do not.

Vanoli was right that military equipment and weapons are political assets, not economic ones — but he stopped short of the deeper conclusion. The same critique applies to the entire production boundary. GDP is a political construction, not a neutral measure of economic reality. Its expansion to include weapons capital while continuing to exclude ecological reproduction costs is a statement about whose claims on the future are recognized as productive and whose are not.

The Intemerate Accounting framework addresses this through its multi-layer compliance chain and its insistence that ecological, social, and community reproduction costs be measured, attributed, and accounted for at the local level, with data sovereignty vested in the communities whose resources are being drawn upon. Where the SNA 2008 asks “what criteria must an asset meet to enter the production boundary?” and answers with technical criteria about repeated use and service lives, Intemerate Accounting asks the prior question: who decides what counts as an asset, and in whose interest is that boundary drawn?

The practical implication is, for example, a community in Fiji whose mataqali land sits adjacent to military infrastructure — or whose fisheries are affected by naval activity — is not a participant in the SNA’s asset accounting. The land exists; the fisheries exist. But under SNA 2008, what is recognized as capital is the military hardware, not necessarily the reef system it may degrade, unless of course the reefs have enforceable ownership and generate economic benefits. The Intemerate framework proposes to invert this: ecological and community assets are primary; military expenditures are a liability that should be disclosed, not a productive input to be capitalized.

And just to be clear, when we talk about environmental or ecological assets, that ownership applies to the physical boundaries as much as the ownership and management of its data.

The Decolonial Stakes of Statistical Standards

The 2003-2015 SNA military assets debate is an accounting dispute about GDP measurement, and it is also something else. It is a record of how dominant states use technical multilateral institutions to normalize the priorities of their own political economies as universal methodological standards.

In summary, the technical structure of hegemony remains: the Advisory Expert Group voted; the Canberra II Group recommended; the UN Statistical Commission endorsed; but the United States had already implemented it. In this scenario, the fox had already eaten, and the vote was about whether to call the dish a universal standard.

The question that Intemerate Accounting raises — and that the brand new World Data Organization, inaugurated in Beijing on March 30, 2026, now creates space to ask in a different institutional context — is whether alternative measurement frameworks can achieve the same kind of institutional recognition, not through unilateral implementation by powerful states, but through multilateral deliberation that includes the communities and South-South economies whose ecologies and social reproduction costs are currently invisible in the core accounts.

Works Cited

Advisory Expert Group on National Accounts. “Decision of the AEG on the Classification of Military Weapon Systems as Fixed Assets.” United Nations Statistics Division, February 2004.

Advisory Expert Group on National Accounts. “AEG Meeting February 2004: Recommendation of Consultation.” United Nations Statistics Division, 2004.

Banco de Portugal. “Comment on Military Expenditures.” Country comment submitted to ISWGNA/AEG, 2004.

Federal Statistical Office of Germany. “Updating of the SNA-93, Issue 19: Military Expenditures.” Wiesbaden, 16 July 2004.

Mahdi, Fadhil. Expert comment on military expenditures issue. In Expert Comments for Issue: Military Expenditures. United Nations Statistics Division, 2004.

Moulton, Brent R. “Canberra II Group’s Recommendations to Treat Military Weapon Systems as Fixed Assets.” SNA/M1.04/09, United Nations Statistics Division, 17 December 2003 (revised 10 March 2004).

Moulton, Brent R. “Canberra II Group’s Recommendations to Treat Military Weapon Systems as Fixed Assets.” Canberra II Group on Non-Financial Assets, 17 December 2003.

Paparella, Christof, and Viet Vu. “Military Weapon Systems as Fixed Assets.” Workshop on 1993 System of National Accounts Update, Bangkok, 19-22 April 2005. United Nations Statistics Division.

United States Bureau of Economic Analysis [Landefeld, J. Steven]. Letter to Dr. Paul Cheung, Director, Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations. 6 October 2006.

van de Ven, Peter. “New Standards for Compiling National Accounts: What’s the Impact on GDP and Other Macro-Economic Indicators?” OECD Statistics Brief 20 (February 2015).

Vanoli, André. Letter to members of the ISWGNA on military expenditures. N° 01-2004-AV, 4 February 2004.

United Nations Statistics Division. *Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting: Interim Version*. Studies in Methods, Series F, No. 61. New York: United Nations, 1993.

United Nations. *System of National Accounts 1993*. Brussels/Luxembourg, New York, Paris, Washington D.C.: Commission of the European Communities — Eurostat, IMF, OECD, United Nations, World Bank, 1993.

“World Wide Military Expenditures.” Data compilation from GlobalSecurity.org/CIA World Factbook, c. 2007-2008.

Not Vampire, not Zombie, but Jiangshi

In the multipolar daylight, Europe is neither vampire nor zombie. The better image is the jiangshi. In Chinese folklore, the jiangshi is an old corpse that cannot generate life from within and survives by consuming the qi, the life-force of the living. That is an appropriate depiction of a fictional EU-BRICS arrangement. The issue is not whether the EU will join BRICS, it will not and to be clear it has not stated that. The issue is whether the EU can enter BRICS-adjacent growth zones and redirect that life force through European legal and regulatory systems. That is why co-option is the right term. Cooperation implies a shared design, like the Marshall Plan or the Washington Consensus. Co-option means entry, capture, and rerouting.

BRICS, as members of the G20, sits at a key intersection between OECD-linked capital and G77 development priorities. While that overlap is shifting the economic compass toward multipolar centers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Global North still has advantages vis the US military expansion, as well as the EU rule making authority in Brussels. In that setting, the EU does not need formal BRICS membership to weaken BRICS autonomy. It can work through bilateral agreements, standards regimes, conformity requirements, compliance audits, and market-access conditions that can capture economic and financial growth through legal back door compliance programs.

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EU Environmental Harmonization

While it seems clear that Trump’s impetuous unreliability and tariff policies accelerated Europe’s move towards a more independent trade autonomy, the EU shift, with partial UK alignment, is taking advantage of its role as a major rule-exporter in digital and environmental data governance. That is why EU-India and EU-Mercosur matter beyond tariffs: they are legal channels for setting compliance in markets central to the next phase of multipolar trade.

This next phase, however, appears to be harmonizing with the 2030 timeline of the Sustainable Development Goals, and while this sounds like a positive planetary win, I would caution that from the perspective of natural capital valuation, the alignment between the SDGs, the 2025 revision of the System of National Accounts, and the inclusion of the SEEA, System of Environmental Economic Accounting, will be locking partners into external standards, verification systems, and dispute architectures controlled by Brussels. The most strategic layer is environmental data.

If SDG-era data control is now primary terrain, then much of the EU’s trade diplomacy will downstream data governance. The EU model ties access to data production, data format, traceability, and third-party verification under EU-compatible service oriented templates, likely to induce significant costs to communities, creating further barriers to access for impacted communities. EUDR traceability and geolocation requirements show this directly. INSPIRE-style interoperability shows the deeper structure: define valid environmental knowledge, then define valid market participation. In the economics of this system, cooperation is the language while jurisdiction over data is the reality.

EU-Mercosur

Chapter 18, the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapter of the EU-Mercosur agreements is framed as cooperative, but it centralizes environmental-data in EU-compatible systems: its scope links trade and investment to SDGs, entirety of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), climate, biodiversity, forests, fisheries, and transparency, which makes environmental information a core trade object rather than a side issue (Chapter 18, scope provisions); Article 18.10 then anchors measures in recognized scientific and technical bodies and international standards, with precaution under uncertainty, which in practice advantages actors with stronger certification and interoperability infrastructures (Chapter 18, Art. 18.10); the forests, biodiversity, fisheries, and responsible supply-chain sections deepen traceability and verification expectations so market access increasingly depends on EU-legible proof of origin, legality, and sustainability (Chapter 18, thematic sections); and as stipulated in (18.15), is subject to the same dispute settlement mechanisms (21.3).

The result is the further and ongoing exclusion of indigenous, peasant, conflict displaced and climate vulnerable at-risk communities in regions already impacted by climate change and social instability. Unlike the harsh colonial methods of the 19th century or the neocolonial post war resource grabs, this is a 21st century soft-hard governance system where cooperation is the language, but one where there is a US$100 trillion+ data-validity jurisdiction that remains external to partners. Although I discuss this elsewhere, the Natural Capital valuation is one that will primarily benefit the OECD countries with the highest debt, managed by the biggest asset managers. This is neither fair nor equitable.

EU-India

The EU-India Trade and Sustainable Development chapter (Chapter 21) is comparable to EU-Mercosur on the environmental-data front, even if the chapter numbering differs. Unlike the Mercosur text, I have only seen the India draft and the technical certification aspects seem like a work in progress, without the formal institutionalized governance of Mercosur. However, the India text does combine market access with sustainability obligations that require measurable, verifiable compliance. The practical hegemony channel is external to tariff tables: exporters must increasingly produce EU-legible evidence on emissions, traceability, and due diligence to preserve access. That pressure is reinforced by EU-side regulations such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the EU’s Regulation of Deforestation-free Products (EUDR), which sit outside the FTA text but materially condition participation in the EU market. So while these market mandates may seem benign and even worthwhile, structurally, they are housed within the same structural discourse as sanctionable and hegemonic.

Both these agreements function as legal corridors where “cooperation” language coexists with EU-centered data validity, verification standards, and compliance sequencing. This all goes to show how intermediaries like auditing, validation, banking, insurance, all the regulatory administrations go towards creating value over environmental data will do little more than perpetuate the rentier economy, when alternatives benefitting planet and people could easily exist.

This is why I argue that environmental data hegemony may matter more than tariff schedules and to call the EU-India agreement the “mother of all trade deals” is more of a PR pitch. This deal will formally captured trillions of dollars of SDG data that India will produce, rather than the mere billions of dollars from market access. In this scenario it is the EU that defines the environmental data standards whose intermediaries will decide who is legible, who is fundable, and who is excluded. That is co-option, more than a blood sucking vampire, the EU is a soul snatching jiangshi, feasting on the life-source of planetary data.

BRICS and the RCEP

From this angle, BRICS and RCEP are central, not peripheral. When one considers that BRICS also lead the G77 developing countries, the Global South is expansive reaching across environmental swaths of vast forest and ocean data that should be owned and managed by the indigenous or customary stewards of these regions. Developing countries and peoples are central to the traditional rules of trade, even if they have not been central to the National Accounting revisions or the advancement of the SEEA Central Framework. And while BRICS may be building alternatives in settlement and development finance, and the RCEP in market and production integration, these institutions have not participated in the changes being made to environmental rule making in the system of national accounts. Can BRICS or the RCEP protect indigenous policy space while avoiding capture by the EU compliance systems. Can they coordinate standards that support local data sovereignty or support the development of intermediary markets that do not treat the environment as commodities to be managed by Wall Street asset management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, or Fidelity?

So the conclusion is direct. We are moving from a WTO-unipolar legal center to a contested multi-node order. The EU is unlikely to join BRICS, but it will continue trying to shape BRICS-adjacent trajectories through legal insertion and standards power. The US remains constrained by a debt-military nexus that relies on coercive trade tools and security pressure to try to extend their influence.

The emerging center across BRICS and RCEP, with strong China-ASEAN weight, can hold if it avoids two traps. The first is vampire economics: neoliberal privatization that extracts public capacity. The second is zombie stabilization: permanent emergency financed by debt and militarization. If multipolar institutions reproduce either trap, the old crisis returns like a spirit snatching jiangshi.

Future casting

If BRICS can support initiatives taking place within the G77 when it comes to local data sovereignty, and the establishment of alternative valuation schemes that can benefit trans local intermediary markets within BRICS new payment, finance, and trade systems that will protect social reproduction and sovereign development space, then the transition can endure. The strategic task is to keep qi in living societies and out of exhausted empires, even when co-option arrives politely, over tea and weiqi.

Key references

System of National Accounts (2025)
SDG Report (2025)
SEEA Central Framework (2012) SEEA
SEEA Natural Capital Accounting For Integrated Biodiversity Policies (2020)
World Bank Changing Wealth of Nations (2018)
European Commission EU-India Agreements (2025)
European Commission EU-Mercosur Agreements (2026)
European Commission-INSPIRE Knowledge Base
European Commission-Regulation of Deforestation-free Products
European Commission-Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism
BRICS https://infobrics.org/
RCEP Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership

https://onibaba.substack.com/p/jiangshi-trade-how-the-eu-co-opts

This is a call for Marxists to begin to treat accounting as more than a technocratic background. I would argue that the most powerful battlefield of economic governance is in the field of accounting and its intermediaries. A 21st-century Marxist approach has to include accounting.

For those who have been following our call for stronger civil society engagement in the revision of the UN System of National Accounts, including critiques of the SEEA and the SDG framework, this is the argument.

National accounting may look technical and administrative, yet it is foundational. It determines what an economy is allowed to “see,” what states are expected to optimize, and what becomes eligible for finance, compliance, and enforcement. It shapes how inequality is recorded, how labor is recognized or erased, and how environmental harm is treated as costless background. Changing accounting rules changes the structure of value itself. That is one of the most direct ways to challenge global capitalism’s operating system.

If Marx were writing today, he would likely treat data as a primary site of labor, ownership, and class power.

This piece is anchored in a concrete institutional shift that is already underway. In March 2025, the UN Statistical Commission adopted the 2025 System of National Accounts as the new global standard, with an expanded focus on well-being and sustainability. The 2025 SNA is not a side debate. It is the template that shapes what governments measure, what they report, and what becomes legible to trade rules, climate finance, insurance pricing, procurement, and macroeconomic surveillance. Once sustainability and environmental reporting become embedded in the core statistical standard, the struggle moves from policy rhetoric to accounting definitions and enforcement routines.

The environmental dimension is being formalized through closer alignment with the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. The SEEA Ecosystem Accounting framework was adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 2021, and the SEEA Central Framework is now treated as a major macroeconomic statistical standard that complements the SNA. This matters because it is how ecosystems, resources, and “sustainability” become governable inside national balance sheets and national aggregates. The accounting system decides what counts as an asset, what counts as depletion, what counts as value, and what counts as an externality. Those decisions shape who gets paid, who gets regulated, and who is disciplined.

That is why decolonizing accounting is not a slogan. It is a demand for measurement sovereignty. If the 2025 SNA and SEEA-linked implementation is operationalized through, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals, through the existing architecture of standards, audit firms, ratings agencies, and asset managers, ecosystems and development will be treated as balance-sheet inputs and communities will be treated as data suppliers. This recreates colonial extraction through measurement, where the Global South becomes another table of compliance while the North captures rents through proprietary models, centralized clearing, and securitized “green” products. The same capture logic can travel through top-down carbon markets, debt-coded loss-and-damage delivery, reinsurance and parametric triggers, and tokenized “green” financial instruments, even when they are branded as climate solutions.

The alternative pathway is to treat environmental data as data labor, collective property, and collective wealth. Communities generate high-value information through stewardship, daily survival, exposure to risk, and restoration work. That data belongs under community governance, with Free, Prior, and Informed Consent and enforceable limits on reuse. If communities control baselines, verification, and licensing, they can build translocal, interoperable data markets that fund restoration and livelihood security rather than feeding financial capture. Multipolarity matters here because it increases the number of institutional routes for exchange and settlement, which makes it harder for a single financial center to monopolize standards, pricing, and enforcement.

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Workers of the data world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your block chains.

The closing line of The Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”(1848), frames environmental measurement as a labor relation, where communities produce value through lived conditions and stewardship while others capture the surplus.

National accounting is moving toward environmental economics and expanded environmental reporting. If that shift arrives through the existing institutions of finance and standard-setting, it will treat ecosystems as balance-sheet inputs and it will treat communities as data sources. That pathway reproduces colonial extraction in a new form. It takes measurement authority away from customary governance and places it inside top-down audit firms, ratings agencies, and asset managers. Decolonizing accounting is necessary because the first battle is definitional. Whoever defines the variables, baselines, and verification rules controls the market that follows.

The data owners are the ruling class of the digital age.

From The German Ideology, Part I “Feuerbach” (1947). “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production …” (p.59). Referencing the simple rule of power: whoever owns data infrastructure and standards sets the terms of trade, compliance, and credibility.

We already live in a bifurcated economy. One segment lives inside asset inflation, stock indices, and paper wealth. The other lives inside wages, rents, food prices, energy bills, caregiving, and environmental insecurity. If environmental economics becomes another investable layer owned and managed from the top of that asset world, the bifurcation deepens. Communities will be forced to disclose ecological and social conditions for compliance, while outside institutions capture the revenue through intermediated finance, proprietary models, and securitized products.

Data is a thing. Environmental data is the means of reproduction.

From Capital, Vol. 1, Part III, Chapter VII “The Labour-Process …” (1967). The classic construction of Marx’s “An instrument of labor is a thing, or a complex of things…”) (p.179). The paragraph goes on to describe how “the earth is an instrument of labor, but when used as such in agriculture implies a whole series of other instruments and comparatively high development of labor.”

This matters because environmental reporting is becoming a gatekeeper for credit, insurance, procurement, and cross-border market access.

A different outcome is possible if environmental data is treated as labor, property, and collective wealth. Communities generate high-value information through stewardship, daily practices, risk exposure, and restoration work. That data should remain under community governance through Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, local protocols, and enforceable rules on reuse. Under an Intemerate Accounting approach, the goal is to fund restoration and social resilience as measurable work, verified locally, and exchanged through markets that remain multipolar and translocal.

All that is measured becomes tradable. All that is unmeasured becomes disposable

From the opening line of Capital, Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 1 “Commodities” (1967), Marx writes “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as a “an immense accumulation of commodities…” (p35). This is the political risk of environmental economics as it is currently being designed, because who accumulates the measurement determines who receives funding and who becomes invisible.

Cap-and-trade and carbon markets show how “climate compliance” can become a market for paper instruments that preserves environmental harm while purchasing credits elsewhere, while offset projects can also trigger land and rights conflicts when communities are treated as project sites rather than governing authorities.

To keep this market from being absorbed by Wall Street, the design has to block the usual capture routes: exclusive ownership of standards, central clearing controlled by large financial firms, leverage through debt instruments, and securitization that turns community obligations into tradable claims. The market needs distributed governance, community-controlled verification, non-extractive licensing, and limits that prevent data rights from becoming collateral. It also needs multiple interoperable nodes across regions, so no single financial center can set the price, the model, and the enforcement terms.

The ideas of the ruling class are the data of the ruling class

In the construction of his history of consciousness in The German Ideology, Part 1, Feuerbach (1939), the original text is , “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…” (Marx & Engles, 1939, p 89).

This should clarify why decolonizing accounting starts with categories and definitions, since historical categories decide what counts as “nature,” “risk,” and “value,” as we update them from the 19th century to the data infused 21st century.

When standards are written far from the places being measured, they convert customary relationships into external variables. They also embed assumptions about property, productivity, and legitimacy. The result is a quiet transfer of authority from communities to institutions that can certify, rate, and monetize the measurements.

Loss-and-damage finance, for example, can be undermined when delivery is mediated through institutional hosting arrangements and loan-heavy funding models that deepen debt burdens and constrain public budgets, which shifts repair into a creditor relationship instead of an obligation rooted in responsibility.

Accumulation of data wealth at one pole means accumulation of data poverty at the other.

From Capital, Vol. 1, Part VII, Chapter XXV “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx describes how the “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is … at the same time accumulation of misery …” (p.645). This is the predictable outcome when communities are exploited by a despotism more hateful for its meanness. The image of “law riveting the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock,” should remind us, that at this moment, where there is a paradigm shift in the accounting matrix, there is a brief window of opportunity, to finally overturn the very system that binds us to the rock.

Environmental disclosure without local ownership produces one-way transparency. Communities supply information and absorb enforcement pressure, while external actors hold the models, the platforms, the legal rights, and the revenue. Data poverty shows up as forced disclosure, weak bargaining power, and no remedy when data is reused against community interests.

Reinsurance and parametric “rapid payout” schemes can also replicate this imbalance through basis risk and model-driven triggers, where investors and insurers price the instrument while communities, taxpayers, and governments carry the consequences when payouts miss lived losses.

Expropriate the data-expropriators, or the integument is burst asunder

From Capital, Vol. 1, Part VIII, Chapter XXXII “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” when Marx writes “the expropriators are expropriated,” he is projecting how the logic of accumulation will conclude (p.763). “One capitalist always kills many, and in the narrowing centralization of ownership and accumulation, “the integument is burst asunder.” (haha, meaning that capitalist centralization eventually ruptures under its own contradictions.)

This is a governance statement about reversing extraction, where communities reclaim control over the measurement system and the income streams built on top of it.

The practical requirement is not isolation from markets. The requirement is market structure that prevents permanent alienation of data rights and blocks the consolidation of standard-setting into a small number of firms. The architecture has to keep consent, verification, and licensing enforceable at the community level.

As a warning to central planners, environmental crypto products and tokenized carbon markets can add another backdoor layer of centralized financialization, where credits are repackaged into tokens, where speculation inflates prices, and “impact” claims become detached from on-the-ground repair and consent. The reliance upon these kinds of financial products in an economy overly dominated by wealth accumulation, should only be seen as momentary salve.

From each community according to its data labor, to each community according to its ecological needs

This is central in the sense that it is tied to moral governance. In Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, passage on the “higher phase” of communist society (p.10) “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” which Lenin addresses in his State and Revolution, “The Higher Phase of Communist Society” (pp 81-82 in this volume).

Marx’s “higher phase” is a claim about measurement and distribution becoming social habits rather than coercive administration. It rests on a shift in the conditions of life. The division of labor stops subordinating people. Labor becomes life’s “prime want.” Cooperative wealth flows more abundantly. Only then can society leave behind the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” and adopt the rule, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Lenin reads the same passage as a problem of governance, since the state “withers away” when people no longer require an external authority to police distribution and when productive capacity and social habits make voluntary contribution and free access workable.

In this context, an ecological based decolonial accounting frame translates that argument into the present conflict over environmental measurement. Environmental accounting will increasingly decide the flow of finance, adaptation support, and restoration investment. The question is whether those flows are governed by external standards and investor logics, or the interactions, or by protocols of reciprocity set by the communities who bear the risks and do the work. The “higher phase” in this register is not a slogan about abundance alone. It is an institutional condition in which distribution follows collectively governed protocols, and measurement is owned by those who generate the underlying reality.

That begins with a different definition of production. Under contemporary environmental economics, value is often assigned to “assets” and “services” abstracted from customary relations. Under decolonial accounting, the primary productive act is stewardship and restoration, including theinteraction that documents conditions, validates change, and carries consent. Measurement becomes a community right and a community obligation. It becomes a protocol: how baselines are set, how evidence is gathered, who can verify, what can be shared, what must remain protected, and what reciprocity is required when outsiders benefit. This is the point where Marx’s line about “bourgeois right” becomes practical. Bourgeois measurement insists on commensuration, exchange equivalence, and external audit authority. Decolonial measurement insists on consent, context, and remedy.

From a translocal and FPIC perspective, communities do not need one universal metric designed in distant institutions. They need interoperable pluralism. Protocol becomes the shared engagement that allows different communities to coordinate exchange while preserving local authority. In practice, this means data can travel across regions and institutions only through terms that carry the source community’s governance, including revocation, use limits, and benefit shares. Interoperability serves reciprocity rather than extraction. The market follows the protocol, rather than rewriting the protocol to fit the market.

Distribution then stops being a downstream “allocation problem” and becomes a design principle. Marx’s higher phase shifts the unit of concern from equalized exchange to needs-based access. In decolonial environmental accounting, this means restoration finance and adaptation resources should not be allocated mainly by bankability, creditworthiness, or investor return targets. They should move according to ecological harm, vulnerability, and the labor required for repair. Communities contribute according to their capacities and situated knowledge. Communities receive according to the ecological and social needs produced by histories of dispossession, exposure, and underinvestment. That is the core redistributional meaning of “from each…to each…” once measurement is treated as a political economy question instead of a technical one.

A “higher phase” outcome becomes plausible when three things converge. Measurement authority sits with communities through protocol and reciprocity. Verification is locally rooted and translocally legible. Distribution is governed by needs and repair, rather than by external equivalence rules that treat every community as a comparable unit in an investor portfolio. Marx’s banner line is then no longer only a moral horizon. It becomes a governance claim about who decides the flows of markets, because accounting decides what is real, what is owed, and what can be enforced.

The price-form hides the data-form. The metric looks neutral while power moves through it

From Capital, Vol. 1, Part I, Chapter III “Money, or the Circulation of Commodities” , Marx discusses the price/money-form. To quote:

“The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their a palpable bodily form: it is, therefore, a purely ideal metal form. Although invisible, the value of iron, linen, and corn has actual existence in these very articles: it is ideally made perceptible by their equality with gold, a relation that, so to say, exists only in their own heads. Their owner must, therefore lend them his tongue, or hang a ticket on them, before the prices can be communicated to the outside world (p.95).

To understand why it is important to resurrect Marx in the 21st century, we need to consider where money and monetary value sits inside the data form:

Ecological realities have palpable forms. A river has flow and contamination. A forest has biomass and species relations. A community has health burdens, food security, and exposure to storms. None of these speak in a market language on their own. To make them tradable, they must be converted into a measurement form that can circulate. That conversion is the ecological equivalent of the price tag. It is metadata, indicators, baselines, scoring rules, verification protocols, and reporting templates.

The “ideal form” in the data economy is the metric. A biodiversity score, a carbon ton, a resilience index, or a risk rating is not the ecosystem itself. It is a standardized statement that claims equivalence across places and lives. It can exist as a number in a database long before it corresponds to any lived improvement on the ground. Once expressed, it can be bought, sold, insured, securitized, or used to approve or deny funding. That is why metrics have power. They convert complex life into an exchangeable unit.

The “owner lends them his tongue” becomes a question of who has the authority to speak for the ecosystem. In top-down environmental accounting, the tongue belongs to institutions that set standards and certify claims: auditors, ratings agencies, large NGOs, consultancies, and financial platforms. They decide what counts as a “forest,” what counts as “degradation,” what counts as “restoration,” what time horizon matters, what uncertainty is acceptable, and what proof is required. Communities then become suppliers of raw observations, while outside actors control the language that turns those observations into financial instruments and compliance categories.

Decolonial accounting targets that exact choke point. It says communities must own the measurement tongue. They must define baselines and categories through customary governance and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. They must control how ecological data is collected, stored, verified, and licensed. They must also control the right to refuse, the right to revoke, and the right to demand reciprocity. In this frame, ecological data is data labor and collective wealth. The metric is not allowed to detach from protocol. The price tag cannot be hung on a community’s environment by someone else.

This is also why capture risk is predictable. Once ecological data is turned into standardized metrics, it becomes easy to route value upward through familiar mechanisms: proprietary scoring models, centralized registries, pay-to-play certification, and securitized “green” products. A decolonial approach breaks that chain by insisting that the measure is not just a number. It is a governed relationship. The metric must carry the community’s terms of use and benefit, so the market cannot treat the ecosystem as a silent object and treat people as a passive dataset.

The Intemerate Equation

This is where the intemerate equation comes in. It is a tangible equation that can be used to produce metric data. Data is acquired through a community defined baseline across time. It establishes a baseline expectation according to what communities define. It measures the deviations, tracking the trajectory on a timeline. By itself, these might just seem like inconsequential numbers that have no bearing on values that can be interpreted monetarily, but this is where intermediary markets come in. They are the core facilities for scoring data values into monetary values.

Intermediary Markets

Intermediary markets can sit between local data sovereignty and interglobal exchange, while keeping authority close to the people who bear the ecological and economic risks. Community data cooperatives and trusts can hold environmental datasets, set consent terms, and negotiate licenses as a collective. Local verification and audit guilds can validate baselines, methods, and outcomes, with indigenous and customary authority embedded in the audit standard. A restoration procurement market can pay for verified actions and services, including monitoring, remediation, regenerative agriculture, watershed work, and biodiversity recovery. A compliance translation market can convert local indicators into reporting formats required by governments or cross-border standards without surrendering underlying ownership. A data licensing exchange can grant time-bound, purpose-bound access rights, priced for use and reciprocity, with community veto and revocation built in. A reciprocal benefit and dividend market can route a defined share of any downstream value back to the communities that generated the data and did the work. A risk mutual and insurance market can use community metrics to price adaptation support and disaster recovery without predatory premiums or exclusionary rules. A dispute resolution and remedy market can provide arbitration, enforcement, and sanctions for misuse, including penalties for unauthorized reuse and mechanisms for restitution.

The point of these intermediaries is functional power. They translate data sovereignty into real exchange without surrendering the means of measurement. That is how multipolar, translocal, interglobal markets can grow without becoming another extractive frontier. When communities own the baselines, the verification ledgers, and the licensing terms, environmental economics can fund restoration and livelihood security on community-defined conditions. If they do not, environmental economics becomes an external management regime where Global South, displaced, and marginalized communities supply the metrics while Wall Street and allied intermediaries capture the rents.

Data clicks/cliques

In the older party-state usage, “cliques” usually meant organized factional loyalty networks inside a centralized organization, seen as competing with formalized state discipline and sometimes treated as a threat. In a data context, “data clicks/cliques” can describe decentralized, implied agreements among people and communities who share norms, methods, and obligations across distance. They are less about capturing a single hierarchy and more about building distributed trust.

In practical terms, a translocal data clique is informal and may share a in a particular market . Members adopt shared protocol for consent, verification, reciprocity, and enforcement. They recognize each other’s audits. They share templates and methods. They coordinate refusal when terms are extractive. They also coordinate exchange when terms are fair. This makes a market possible without surrendering measurement authority to one central registry or one financial hub.

The danger is that cliques can still become gatekeepers. They can become exclusionary, opaque, or captured by charismatic brokers. The safeguard is to keep clique power conditional and when those conditions hold, “data cliques” become a decentralized infrastructure for decolonial accounting rather than a backdoor hierarchy.

References

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Ten Classics of Marxism. The Communist Manifesto. 1940 International Publishers, 1947.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, International Publishers, 1967.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Edited. by R. Pascal. The German Ideology. Parts I & III. International Publishers, 1939.
Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. International Publishers, 1938.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. The Pelican Marx Library, 1973
Saiki, Arnie. Ecological-Economic Accounts: Towards Intemerate Values. Pacific Theological College, 2020.
Saiki, Arnie. Intemerate Earth. “Posts”, https://intemerate.earth/blog. Accessed 29 Jan. 2026.