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Universities have a critical role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both for implementing active policies and for encouraging other actors to participate. This requires having the skills and mind-sets to contribute to these challenges. The relevance and the commitment of universities to sustainability has led to the inclusion of SDGs in the strategies and agendas of these institutions. This requires the involvement of all the actors and some structural and cultural changes that put SDGs at the core of the governance and management of the university, embracing all the stakeholders. Various internal and external factors may influence the impact and success of the policies and activities aiming at achieving the SDGs, both from an overall perspective and for individual SDGs. This paper assesses the influence of some internal factors, such as the presence of universities on the internet, the level of internationalization or the availability of financial resources. Through both regression analyses and the Gephi method, our results confirm the importance of the presence on the internet, the internationalization of the university and the financial resources for research and infrastructure received from regional governments for Spanish public universities to make a greater contribution to SDGs.

This paper contributes to the literature about sustainability assessment and goes a step further by studying the effect on university performance. The aim is to analyze, from an external perspective, the relationships between the three dimensions of sustainability in universities (environmental, economic, and social), the similarities between universities, and the impact that it can have on performance. In order to carry out an empirical assessment for Spanish public universities, an index is proposed to measure sustainability through indicators for the three dimensions. The results show that there is a positive correlation among the three dimensions, but only the association between the environmental and the economic dimension is statistically significant, which evidences that there is not an integrated perspective of sustainability. Although there are no common patterns among universities, some similarities among them were found. Finally, the paper shows that the entities that integrate sustainability in their plans and activities have a positive impact on performance.

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In the public sector, citizens have been recognized as potential users of financial reporting elaborated by governments. A specific use of financial reporting by citizens is voting decisions, where they can approve or disapprove of the politicians' management. Political budget cycles literature contains many studies that evidence that politicians manage the budget in order to increase their possibilities of being reelected, but there is no consensus about the outcome. This chapter aims to study to what extent financial management influences electoral outcomes and if there is any evidence that the financial management of governments has an impact on election results. The study is focused on Spanish local governments and uses data from the elections of 2011 and 2015. The results indicate that governments with higher capital investments or fewer deficits have no advantages in the elections. However, citizens reward government policies with higher levels of social expenditures and punish higher fiscal pressure.

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This chapter aims to analyze the characteristics of Spanish governments that fail to achieve budgetary stability, as well as propose a model for the analysis of financial sustainability of governments that can help in predicting risk for financial sustainability. The analysis is focused on Spanish local governments with more than 5,000 inhabitants that have elaborated the annual plan because they did not achieve budgetary stability (79 local governments). Using the principal components analysis, the authors developed a model for the analysis of the characteristics of these governments. The model is made up of three components created from six indicators usually considered in the literature as relevant. The results evidence the indicators useful to measure the three dimensions identified by the IPSASB as relevant: revenue dimension, debt dimension, and public services dimension.

In nonprofit organisations, a mix of financial and nonfinancial information is necessary to discharge accountability, and with this aim, social accounting emerged some years ago. Integrated reporting has been more recently developed with the aim of reporting the connections and relationships between all the factors that affect an organisation’s ability to create value over time. This paper analyses what integrated reporting can add to accountability and management in nonprofit organisations, considering that it includes performance as well as social and environmental aspects. The paper uses a case study to analyse how integrated social reporting has been implemented in some organisations and what are the particularities that must be considered to develop a model for these organisations. Semi-structured interviews with the responsible of three social organisations have been carried out to find out what improvements integrated reporting can make and what is necessary for their implementation.