Sustainability reporting by Australian public sector organisations: Why they report

Abstract

Recent research on social and environmental (SE) reporting has focused on corporations, rather than public sector agencies. Also, there has been little interest in ascertaining the views of preparers of accounts regarding SE reporting. This study analysed why a group of “better practice” organisations reported on SE matters. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with key preparers in the various organisations and found that their reporting was informed by the latest GRI and aimed at mostly internal stakeholders. The annual report was only one of the media used for disclosure and adoption was driven by a key individual in the organisation.

Keywords:

• Organisational sustainability
• Social and environmental reporting
• Public sector agencies
• Sustainability reporting
• Global reporting initiatives
• Preparers accounts’

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Universities of Bologna and Sydney for their research support. Also Carlos Sterling and Fiona Crawford from the University of Sydney for their research and editorial assistance. The paper benefited from comments from participants at the CSEAR Conference, Sydney.

Notes

1 By “preparers’, we mean those people involved in the processes and practices of reporting within organizations.

2 The Centre for Public Agency Sustainability Reporting™ is a collaboration of: the Global Reporting Initiative, ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability, the City of Melbourne and the State of Victoria. See: http://www.publicagencyreporting.org, accessed on 19th October 2007.

3 There are a plethora of frameworks being used, such as the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), Intellectual Capital (IC), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) (Yongvanich and Guthrie, 2006).

4 On the website of the corporateregister.com, which lists organisations and social and environmental reports, in the section for Government, Authorities & Agencies, there are 82 reports provided by organisations all over the word, see http://www.corporateregister.com/, accessed on 9th September 2008.

5 The Centre had an international remit and was based in Melbourne, Australia. A number of public agencies in Australia and New Zealand have become pioneers, with agencies such as the Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services (Australia), the Commonwealth Department for the Environment and Heritage (Australia) and the Ministry for Environment (New Zealand) among the first public agencies worldwide to produce sustainability reports using the GRI framework.

6 The findings of the research are presented in “Sustainability Reporting by Public Agencies: International Uptake, Forms and Practice” (Dickinson, 2005). Further, Leeson et al. (2007) discuss some of the findings.

7 Australia is a federation of six states and two federal territories, and includes three levels of government—federal, state and local. Each level of government has departments and also public corporations.

8 To guarantee anonymity of the interviewees, as per University ethics requirements, it is not possible to link interviews with individual organisations from the group. Key preparers were self-selected within each organisation as they identified themselves as responsible within the organisation for SR.

9 The semi-structured interview questions are available from the first named author of this paper.

10 All the interviews undertaken were transcribed, except one because of the poor quality of audio. This has been deleted from the group.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Federica Farneti

Federica Farneti is a Associate Professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, Faculty of Economics and Business – Forlì Campus, Italy. Her major research topics focus on extended performance measurements, public sector accountability, outsourcing, planning programming and reporting system and sustainability reporting for public and not for profit organisations.

James Guthrie

James Guthrie is a Professor of Accounting at the University of Sydney in Australia and Chair of Discipline. His research and teaching interests include public sector accounting, auditing, accountability and management, social and environmental reporting and auditing, management of knowledge and intellectual capital and the measurement of intangibles. He also consults on public and private sector management, management of knowledge, intellectual capital, budget performance, and annual reporting strategies.