Influential Variables of Sustainability Disclosures by Spanish Public Hospitals

Sustainability Reporting in the Public Realm—Trends and Patterns in Knowledge Development

“…Most of their scientific work was disseminated by top productive sources (Sustainability, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Journal of Cleaner Production and Meditary Accountancy Research). Moreover, particular issues related to sustainability have also been approached, such as accountability [5,8,15,35] and disclosure [12,13,36], mostly published in public thematic journals (Public Money and Management, International Journal of Public Sector Management, Public Performance and Management Review). Besides, there was a high focus on studying the topic in a particular public sector area, namely higher education, since universities were, by far, frequently approached [8,15,30,31,[37][38][39].…”

“…This stream of research includes studies focused on the analyzed topic in several organizations of the public sector, such as universities [5,15,31,36,37,[42][43][44][45], local governments [32,[46][47][48][49], hospitals [12,50,51] and state-owned enterprises [7,13,52,53], using GRI standards and/or <IR> framework. The heterogeneity of these entities and the reporting guidelines approached suggests how academics have tried to identify contributions to sustainability reporting in the public sector from different perspectives.…”

“…It is characterized by the presence of topics typically related to transparency and disclosure, thus approaching various other types of reporting, such as Internet reports [12,32,33,38,[46][47][48], stand-alone sustainability reports [43,54] or popular reports [59][60][61]. Web-page disclosure has recently become an innovative reporting tool, an instrument of transparency for sustainability information [48], which confirms the lack of specific law requirements supporting the preparation of sustainability reporting [11,56].…”

“…Finally, the sustainability reporting in the public sector, regardless of the particular area approached or the choice of a reporting format, was mainly explained through the accountability concept [5,8,35,58,61,65] and specific theories, namely stakeholder [11,37,66], legitimacy [11,12,51,52,62] and institutional theory [12,51]. These results are consistent with prior literature [6,17], concluding that sustainability reporting evolved under high institutional pressure driven by both the desire to answer stakeholders' demand for greater accountability and transparency, and the willingness to meet their expectations for increasing legitimacy and reputation.…”

“…In this context, we have recently assisted in an increased need for sustainability reporting in the public sector, as organizations from this field are also engaged in sustainable development and are stewards of social and environmental issues [7][8][9]. They are expected to create public value in compliance with the principles of environmental, economic and social sustainability [9][10][11] to provide non-financial disclosure to meet stakeholders' expectations and to ensure adequate levels of accountability [12,13]. However, evidence reveals that, although sustainability should be central to public services [14], institutions from this sector are still taking hesitant steps regarding reporting about sustainability, social and environmental strategies and undertaken actions [15].…”