“…With a few exceptions (Tawiah, 2023; Tawiah and Soobaroyen, 2022), much of the accounting work in emerging economies delineates several unintended consequences resulting from the adoption of these measures, ranging from their ceremonial adoption to comply with loan conditionalities, to the misuse of these measures in promoting and covering up large-scale state-level malpractices such as corruption, patronage and clientelism (Adhikari et al , 2013; Hopper, 2017; Nyamori et al , 2017; Bakre et al , 2017). It is worth noting that such critiques relating to NPFM measures also prevailed in developed Western economies and continue to this day, following their own experiences of NPM over the last four decades, which are alleged to be persistently “ undermining democratic legitimacy” (Grossi et al , 2023; Polzer et al , 2022).…”