1. A Change of Era—or a Change of Code?
The distinction between an era of change and a change of era is consequential. An era of change can leave the underlying grammar of institutions intact. A change of era suggests that the assumptions through which societies understand and govern themselves are becoming unstable. The September 2026 issue of Mother Pelican provides evidence for the latter interpretation. Rees identifies a growth-addicted cultural narrative that persists despite accumulating evidence of ecological overshoot and systemic risk (Rees, 2026). Bardi complicates demographic narratives by emphasizing the dynamics of population rather than treating population as a static variable (Bardi, 2026). Andersson asks who should govern artificial intelligence once it becomes infrastructure for collective cognition (Andersson, 2026).
These contributions converge on a point that is easily missed when crises are treated separately: the problem is not simply that institutions face new facts. Institutions are also being asked to govern realities that their inherited categories were not designed to represent. The transition is therefore simultaneously material, institutional, and epistemic.
2. Growth, Energy and the Limits of Representation
The growth economy is materially dependent on energy and resource throughput. Tverberg's analysis connects energy affordability with demand, inequality and macroeconomic stability, showing why energy cannot be reduced to a technical input detached from purchasing power and social distribution (Tverberg, 2026). Hagens adds a complementary distinction between reversible and irreversible losses. His argument is particularly important for valuation: a monetary loss and the loss of topsoil, biodiversity or institutional trust are not interchangeable simply because both can be represented numerically (Hagens, 2026).
This exposes a fundamental weakness in conventional governing metrics. A number may be precise while the ontology behind the number remains impoverished. GDP can rise while ecosystems decline. A financial asset can appreciate while its ecological foundations deteriorate. A project can improve an accounting return while transferring costs to communities or future generations. Measurement therefore does not merely describe reality; once institutionalized, it helps organize behavior.
3. Accounting and the Government of Value
Accounting should not be reduced either to neutral technique or to mere ideology. Its importance lies precisely in the disciplined institutional authority of its representations. Accounting categories make some relations visible and comparable while leaving others outside the decision frame. The critical question is therefore not simply whether an accounting representation is correct within its technical rules, but what kind of reality those rules authorize institutions to govern.
Alaka's contribution provides a useful conceptual distinction between value, valuation and price (Alaka, 2026). This distinction allows a sharper question: what happens when price becomes the dominant institutional proxy for value? A forest may have a market price, but ecological regeneration, cultural meaning, watershed protection and intergenerational significance cannot be reduced to that price without loss. Likewise, care work may be socially indispensable while remaining only partially represented in formal economic accounts.
The issue is not that everything must be monetized. The opposite may be closer to the point. A post-growth accounting imagination may need to recognize plural forms of value without forcing all of them into one monetary scale.
4. Post-Growth as an Epistemic Problem
Post-growth is often presented as a problem of reducing consumption or material throughput. That is necessary but insufficient. A society can consume less and still preserve institutions whose legitimacy depends on accumulation. The deeper issue is the criterion of success. What constitutes enough? What counts as prosperity when ecological reproduction becomes a non-negotiable constraint?
Dworatzek's focus on ecological footprint makes visible the gap between conventional economic success and ecological demand (Dworatzek, 2026). Galanti emphasizes transformative learning and the need for new capacities for wise action (Galanti, 2026). Rees goes further by arguing that information and education alone have not produced the cultural transformation required; the obstacle lies partly in deeply embedded cognitive and institutional structures (Rees, 2026).
The post-growth transition therefore requires a transformation in what institutions recognize as success. Sufficiency, resilience, care, regeneration, solidarity and intergenerational responsibility must become institutionally intelligible rather than remaining moral supplements to financial calculation.
5. From Knowledge to Epistemic Sovereignty
Epistemic sovereignty does not mean rejecting science or expertise. It means maintaining the capacity to participate in defining legitimate questions, evidence, categories, measures, and purposes. This distinction is essential in a world increasingly governed through computational systems.
Andersson argues that artificial intelligence may become a global cognitive infrastructure and therefore raises a governance question extending beyond commercial regulation (Andersson, 2026). Rollo links AI acceleration with the growth imperative, warning against technological development that simply intensifies the logic already driving ecological and social instability (Rollo, 2026).
The accounting parallel is direct. If institutions rely on standardized metrics, algorithms and reporting systems to make decisions, whoever defines their categories acquires substantial governing power. Epistemic sovereignty therefore concerns not only knowledge production but the architecture through which knowledge becomes actionable.
6. The Sovereign Code
The Sovereign Code is proposed as a research program rather than a closed doctrine. Its premise is that every governance regime contains a code: categories that determine what can be known, measured, valued, and acted upon.
Six questions follow. What is made visible? What is valued? Which temporal horizons count? Whose territories and ecological capacities sustain apparent prosperity? Who participates in defining the categories? What accountability follows when previously hidden consequences become visible?
This approach does not seek a single universal alternative indicator. That would reproduce the centralization it criticizes. Instead, it seeks institutional capacity for contestation, comparison, dialogue and reconstruction of value systems. In this sense, sovereignty is not isolation. It is the capacity to participate in the rules by which collective life is interpreted and governed.
7. See: Making the Invisible Visible
The first movement is seeing. Institutions see through categories. Accounting sees assets, liabilities, income, and costs. Ecological assessment sees material flows and ecosystem conditions. Communities may see care, territory, memory and obligations that formal systems omit.
Heinberg's final contribution in the issue is especially significant because it documents the political weakening of climate attention even as physical risks intensify (Heinberg, 2026). His intervention demonstrates that visibility itself can become politically contested. Lavoie similarly draws attention to ecological disruption whose causes can remain outside ordinary political perception (Lavoie, 2026).
A Sovereign Code therefore begins diagnostically: it asks what the dominant system cannot adequately see.
8. Judge: Reconstructing the Criteria of Value
Seeing is insufficient. Judgment asks according to which criteria a society evaluates what it sees. This is where the distinction between measurement and valuation becomes decisive. Measurement asks how much; valuation asks why it matters, to whom, over what horizon, and with what consequences.
Hagens' distinction between reversible and irreversible loss offers a powerful criterion for institutional judgment. If ecological assets and social capacities can disappear on timescales that exceed human planning horizons, then conventional financial comparability can become morally and institutionally misleading (Hagens, 2026). The issue is not to abandon economic calculation but to place it within a hierarchy of responsibilities that recognizes irreversibility.
9. Act: Changing the Infrastructures of Decision
Action cannot be reduced to individual consumption choices. Donthi's emphasis on disruptive advocacy is relevant because systems reproduce themselves through institutional dependencies (Donthi, 2026). Public budgets, corporate reporting, investment rules, education, statistical systems and regulatory frameworks shape the space of possible action.
A post-growth transition therefore requires institutional experimentation. Accounting could become more attentive to dependencies on ecological regeneration, social reproduction and long-term resilience. Public reporting could distinguish reversible from irreversible losses. Governance systems could disclose distributional consequences and temporal transfers. None of these proposals is a finished model; they are directions for research.
10. The Decolonial Question
A change of era cannot simply mean exporting another universal model from the Global North to the Global South. Epistemic sovereignty requires reciprocity. Different ecological histories, institutional experiences and intellectual traditions should participate in defining what post-growth means.
This does not require romanticizing local knowledge or rejecting scientific universality. It requires recognizing that categories such as development, productivity, poverty, efficiency and competitiveness have histories. A genuinely plural transition must therefore ask who has authority to define the problem, the evidence and the solution.
11. Conclusion: Who Will Code the Next Era?
The central issue is not whether humanity can preserve perpetual growth. It is whether societies can sustain human flourishing without making perpetual growth the condition of institutional legitimacy.
The contributions of Mother Pelican's September 2026 issue show why the transition must be understood systemically. Rees foregrounds cultural and cognitive barriers; Hagens distinguishes reversible from irreversible loss; Tverberg connects energy to affordability and distribution; Bardi complicates demographic assumptions; Heinberg demonstrates the political fragility of climate attention; Andersson raises the governance of AI as cognitive infrastructure; and the other contributors broaden the field toward learning, ecological footprints, advocacy and institutional value.
Together they support a stronger proposition: the transition from growth to post-growth is also a struggle over the categories through which value becomes governable. Accounting is part of that struggle because it is one of the institutional technologies through which societies render economic reality calculable.
The Sovereign Code therefore proposes four movements:
See what the dominant system makes invisible;
Judge the criteria through which value and justice are defined;
Act upon the institutions that reproduce those criteria; and
Code the categories through which the future becomes intelligible and accountable.
The decisive question is not simply whether humanity will survive a change of era. It is who will have the authority to define what counts as value when growth can no longer define the future.
References
Alaka, O. O. (2026). Institutional Value Conversion: The Institutional Conditions for Human Flourishing. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Andersson, D. (2026). Who Will Govern Humanity's New Cognitive Infrastructure? Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Bardi, U. (2026). Worried About Overpopulation? Why? Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Donthi, N. R. (2026). Disruptive Advocacy: Breaking Ground to Build Better. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Dworatzek, P. (2026). Less Consumption, Faster: The Future of the U.S. Ecological Footprint. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Galanti, M. E. (2026). Miniatures of Evolution: Transformative Learning for Wise Action. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Hagens, N. (2026). What Can't Be Rebuilt: Irreversible Stakes of an Uncertain Future. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Heinberg, R. (2026, July). As America Turns 250, Its Attention to Continued Survival Fades and Fractures. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Lavoie, G. (2026). Global Invasion Underway: The Primary Invader Is Missing from the Suspect List. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Rees, W. E. (2026). Potpourri—Facets of Life, Faith, Science, and Reality: Part Two. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Rollo, D. (2026). Growth Mania and the AI Extinction Threat. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
Tverberg, G. (2026). Affordability, Not Scarcity, Is the Real Energy Crisis. Mother Pelican, 22(9).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Luis Antonio González Santos is Associate Professor of Public Administration and Accounting, Faculty of Economic Sciences, National University of Colombia, and director of the Accounting Observatory. His research focuses on critical accounting, environmental governance, and sustainability, with an emphasis on the genealogical method. He has contributed to international debates on education for sustainability and socio-ecological transitions.
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