Sustainability reporting by local governments: a magic tool? Lessons on use and usefulness from European pioneers

ABSTRACT

A growing number of city governments worldwide engage in sustainability reporting, voluntarily and responding to legal pressures. Diverse practices emerged based on unique choices concerning formats, periodicity, authorship and dissemination efforts. Such design questions and associated outcomes are highly relevant for practitioners yet unaddressed in standard guidelines and most prior research that primarily concern content and conjectured reporting benefits. This article presents a framework suited to assessing real-life practices and outcomes. An exploratory evaluation in Amsterdam, Basel, Dublin, Freiburg, Nuremberg and Zurich suggests that sustainability reporting can benefit organizational change, management and communication yet also lead to ‘fatigue’ and discontinuation.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability reporting
• local governments
• integrated reporting
• sustainability indicators
• GRI

Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate the open sharing of data and thoughts by all interviewed practitioners, institutional support provided by VNG International (The Hague), and feedback on the manuscript from anonymous reviewers and Larry J. O’Toole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ludger Niemann

Ludger Niemann works as Lecturer in International Public Management at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. He holds degrees in Natural Sciences (Cambridge University), Psychology (Freiburg University) and Public Administration (Erasmus University Rotterdam), and is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente researching the use of sustainability indicators in Latin American and European cities.

Thomas Hoppe

Thomas Hoppe holds a master’s degree in Public Administration specializing in Public Policy and Environmental Policy, and a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Twente. Thomas’ research focus is ‘Governance of Energy Transitions’. Currently, he works as Associate Professor at the section of Policy, Organisation, Law and Gaming (POLG) within the Multi Actor Systems (MAS) department of the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) at Delft University of Technology.