A Comparative Analysis of Transparency in Sustainability Reporting by Local and Regional Governments

Abstract

Although the importance of sustainability reporting in the public sector is widely recognized, there are few studies about this issue. This paper analyzed the practices of diffusion of information on sustainability in local governments. So, we observed the Websites of the largest local governments in Spain using a list of items from the guidelines of GRI and comparing the results with the results of the Spanish regional governments. Our findings show that local governments reported some information (50% of the items), but less than regional governments (60%). Social information is the most widespread and environmental information is the least reported.

Enhancing Sustainability Transparency in Local Governments—An Empirical Research in Europe

“…Some previous studies have analysed the disclosure of general or financial information on LG websites [16,53]. In recent years, studies of sustainability transparency in public administration and public utilities have also appeared [17][18][19][54][55][56][57] and several papers have analysed the disclosure of sustainability information by LGs. For example, one study [17] described an exploratory analysis of six European cities, while another [58] focused on the annual sustainability reports of four LGs in Australia.…”

“…In recent years, many papers have been published on the question of online transparency by LGs [14][15][16], and some have considered the question of online disclosure of sustainability information [12,13,[17][18][19], but in most cases only a partial analysis of the situation is presented. In addition, although research findings suggest that cultural differences can affect accountability and transparency [20][21][22], few studies have been undertaken to address the question of transparency on sustainability from the perspective of the cultural traditions prevailing in different countries [23,24], or to analyse factors that may influence this information disclosure.…”

Promoting Online Transparency to Help Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals: An Empirical Study of Local Governments in Latin America

“…At the same time, the governmental disclosure of sustainability-related information has attracted considerable research interest. Thus, many papers have recently been presented on information disclosure by the public sector, and especially by local and regional governments in Europe [6,19,25,28,36,[43][44][45][46].…”

Public Sector (Un)Sustainability: a study of GRI adherence and sustainability reporting disclosure standards in Public Institutions and State-Owned Companies of the Public Agency Sector

“…Due to their size and inuence, public agencies are expected to take the lead by publicizing their activities in order to promote sustainability. However, their sustainability reports are proceeding more slowly than those of other sectors (Greiling & Grüb, 2014, Domingues, Lozano, Ceulemans & Ramos, 2017, and there is little research related to social and environmental accounting, accountability, and sustainability in the public sector and the third sector (Adams, Muir & Hoque, 2014;Alcaraz-Quiles, Navarro-Galera & Ortiz-Rodríguez, 2014;Domingues, Lozano, Ceulemans & Ramos, 2017;Dumay et al, 2010;Greiling et al, 2015), even though numerous authors have reported on its importance (Alcaraz-Quiles et al, 2014;Ball & Bebbington, 2008;Ball, Grubnic & Birchall, 2014;Ball & Osborne, 2011;Greiling et al, 2015;Gray et al, 2014). Additionally, many of the studies in this area are related exclusively to a single country or to a specic type of organization (Papenfuß, Grüb & Frieländer, 2015).…”