Sustainability Reporting for Inland Port Managing Bodies: A Stakeholder-Based View on Materiality

Abstract

Sustainability reporting has been marked by a rise in importance in recent years as it has proved to be an important management tool in the understanding of where an organization is situated along the sustainability pathway. However, industries have shown different behaviors towards embracing this practice. In this paper, we turn our attention to the port industry, using the metropolitan inland Port of Brussels (Belgium) as a case study. Given the contested nature of port activities within urban regions, metropolitan inland ports are expected to benefit from the development of a sustainability report as it allows a more transparent account of the contribution of port activities to the objectives of different stakeholder groups in the urban environment. The case study is based on a survey yielding 74 valid responses from different stakeholder groups (employees, clients, and broader society). Our results show that the expected content of a sustainability report is viewed differently by these various stakeholder groups in terms of the relative importance of the dimensions of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), as well as in terms of the specific indicators representing material issues. Furthermore, the concept of boundary setting with respect to the different dimensions of the TBL and the desired level of inclusion by stakeholders during the development of a sustainability report are differently assessed. The paper is of interest to academics as well as policy makers, as the research results complement the existing insights on sustainability reporting in general and can be used as basis to stimulate the adoption of sustainability reporting by inland ports.

Value Creation through Corporate Sustainability in the Port Sector: A Structured Literature Analysis

“…Income and profitability Amount of cargo handled annual cargo volume [56] Productivity/throughput/growth cargo volume per vessel [56,57,61] Corporate and property taxes tax income [56] Input cost costs [56] Investment and market share investment amount, market share [6,61] Management efficiency [56] Service quality Hinterland connection meters of transport ways, amounts of connections [61,66] Quality of handling numbers of accidents, environmental impact per handling [6,53,61] Port operations qualitative questionnaires [53,56] Port charges costs [56] Input cost costs [56] Macro-value GDP generation GDP income [56,57,66] Tax generation tax income [56] Trade facilitation trade amounts [56] Cruise tourism passenger numbers [61] Traffic transhipments, cargo handling [53,61] Given the limitations of this paper's research, the framework analysis focused on contributions regarding affecting factors and measurements of studies that already contributed. The TBL approach was applied to differentiate measurements into categories of economic (Table 6), social (Table 7), and environmental (Table 8) factors.…”

“…Community impact Employment number of jobs created [6,56,61,66] Safety number of safety incidents [56,62] Security number of security incidents [62] Resilience recovery time [57,61] Heritage and cultural impact existing Yes/No [56,61] Employment quality CSR communication/education quality of training [1,5,16,58,60] CSR decision involvement existing Yes/No [16] Corporate culture existing Yes/No [16,58,67] Legal and political benefits CSR policy existing Yes/No [1,5,6,16,58,60] CSR information publication number of reports [5,16,58,68] CSR efforts beyond compliance existing Yes/No [1,58] Establishment of evaluation indicators existing Yes/No [1,58] Green port development plan plan existing [1,5,54,60] Economic factors can be differentiated into clusters of income and profitability, service quality, and macro-values. While the clusters of income and profitability and service quality reflect internal economic CSR factors, the aspect of macro-values draws a broader picture.…”

Determinants of Sustainability Reporting in the Present Institutional Context: The Case of Port Managing Bodies

“…The opposite reasoning holds as well: the higher the level of inclusion of stakeholders, the more the organization wishes to achieve a consensus of stakeholders' needs and expectations, which will, in turn, be reflected in an SR. Only when stakeholders are consulted to a high degree and on an ongoing basis will the content of an SR not only show what the focal organization believes its stakeholders want to know but also those issues (positive and/or negative) that are regarded as material by the stakeholders themselves. Research of Geerts and Dooms [45] shows the importance of good and open communication between an organization and its stakeholders, as results show that what is material for stakeholders is not always supported to the same extent by the focal organization, and this also applies to the underlying reasons as to why organizations (should) produce an SR [27].…”

“…In the specific context of ports, the approach towards proper stakeholder inclusion is even more complicated because of the prevailing hybrid ownership structures and the variety of involved stakeholder groups, with all aiming for different (sometimes conflicting) objectives [45,46]. Port managers are increasingly aware of the fact that disclosure should consist of a range of diverse topics, tailored to the needs and demands of each individual stakeholder group, in order to reduce the risk of information asymmetry.…”

Geologistics: An Emerging Notion in Maritime Supply Chain

“…Among this component, geologistics concept are seen could be implement in the maritime sector such as in seaport and inland port. The focusing on the resources of land and earth, this concept could help to comprising the basic sustainable component which is based on the triple bottom line (BTL); people, planet, and profit and also called as economic, social and environmental (Geerts & Dooms, 2020;Sislian et al, 2016;Adams et al, 2009). As noted by I. G. (2019), geologistics is the earth science that learns the management process of the transfer and storage of goods and information related to the souce of the end consumer with effectively and efficienctly.…”