Critical Dialogic Accounting and Accountability Engagement : Exploring the Micropolitics of Microfinance and Women's Empowerment Through Participatory Action Research

Prior accounting research highlights the neoliberal discourse that dominates development institutions’ thinking and practices, including its market-focused representations of what it means to be an “empowered women”. Building on Tanima et al. (2020, 2023a,b), we report on a critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA)-based engagement, employing participatory action research (PAR) methods, aimed at encouraging poor women borrowers to critically reflect on neoliberal approaches to microfinance and women’s empowerment and explore alternative possibilities associated with gender and development (GAD) discourse. We show how group discussions and storytelling activities informed by the idea of micropolitics and a “politics of becoming” (Connolly 1995, 2011) prompted shifts in women’s subjectivities and identifications from those dominated by patriarchal discourses and the neoliberal subject position of “rational economic woman” to GAD-based understandings associated with “active citizens”