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The Role of Stakeholders in Sustainability Reporting Assurance

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Abstract

The main purpose of this exploratory analysis is to understand whether, based on evidence gathered from international best practices selected among corporations which adopt the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines in sustainability reporting (SR), stakeholders are significantly consulted and involved—as international literature would indicate—by assurance providers, during assurance processes of SR. We aim at verifying if this practice—known as stakeholder assurance—is in fact widespread in SR assurance by carrying out empirical research, through content analysis, into a sample of 161 assurance statements of international corporations, in order to test characteristics of any stakeholder assurance implemented.

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Notes

  1. Reference is to the cases of Shell, British Telecom, NovoNordisk and Chiquita cited by Park and Brorson (2005).

Abbreviations

AAPs:

Accountant assurance providers

CAPs:

consultant assurance providers

SR:

Sustainability reporting

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Acknowledgment

The author thanks Julia Campbell Hamilton (j.hamilton@email.it) for revision of the English version of this article and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, University of Florence, Via delle Pandette, 9, 50127, Florence, Italy

    Giacomo Manetti & Simone Toccafondi

Authors
  1. Giacomo Manetti
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  2. Simone Toccafondi
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Correspondence to Giacomo Manetti.

Additional information

Giacomo Manetti (PhD) is Assistant Professor in Financial Accounting. Simone Toccafondi is PhD student in Planning and Control at the University of Florence. Although the article is the result of a team effort, Giacomo Manetti can be considered the author of sections “Introduction”, “Stakeholder Assurance”, “Method” and “Conclusions” and Simone Toccafondi the author of section “Results”. Section “Discussion” has been written by both authors.

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Manetti, G., Toccafondi, S. The Role of Stakeholders in Sustainability Reporting Assurance. J Bus Ethics 107, 363–377 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1044-1

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