A defining feature of humanitarian crises is their unpredictable nature,
making them interesting sites to analyse how accounting systems can facilitate
engagement with the unexpected. This thesis explores the question of how
evaluation systems can be designed and practiced to engage with the
complexities of humanitarian crisis settings, in which the potential for
disastrous errors is overwhelming. Informed by empirical research on the
management practices in a large-scale refugee camp, the study investigates
principles and tactics that allow humanitarian evaluation systems to make a
resource of the inevitable ambiguity and incompleteness that define their
contexts. In doing so, the thesis draws from and further develops the concept
of heterarchy, defined as ‘governance through difference’, and shows how it
provides promising insights for accounting research. To explain how
evaluation systems can become performable in the dynamic humanitarian
environments, the study theorizes four interlinked principles that emerge
from the empirical findings. These principles are: (1) in-built tensions between
evaluation dimensions; (2) open and participatory design; (3) relational value
and incompleteness; and (4) enacting minimalist control through a community
of practitioners. In doing so, the study makes three contributions. Firstly, the
study contributes to the accounting literature on the enabling role of
ambiguity by theorizing how evaluation systems can foster approaches and
techniques that embrace ambiguity as a resource to engage with complex
settings. Secondly, it further develops the notion of heterarchy by explicating
how heterarchical tensions can become productive without leading to chaos
and by theorizing additional principles that are necessary to sustain
heterarchies in an organized fashion. Thirdly, departing from the emerging
literature on humanitarian crises that primarily focuses on how accounting
systems can be used to normalize and control disaster settings, the thesis
advances understanding of how accounting technologies can serve as
anomalizing devices for the adaptive management of crises