GRI Sustainability Reporting by INGOs: A Way Forward for Improving Accountability?
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ORIGINAL PAPER
GRI Sustainability Reporting by INGOs: A Way Forward for Improving Accountability? Albert Anton Traxler1 • Dorothea Greiling1 • Hannah Hebesberger1
The Author(s) 2018. This article is an open access publication
Abstract Considering that the members of the International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO) Accountability Charter played a prominent role in initiating the first sector supplement of the Global Reporting Initiative for non-governmental organizations (NGO), the purpose of the paper is to investigate their sustainability reporting (SR) practices in order to evaluate to what extent INGO Charter members comply with this voluntary accountability standard for SR. The empirical analysis is based on a content analysis of sustainability reports. The findings indicate that most of the INGO Charter members are far away from a comprehensive reporting practice. Hence, critical voices could assert that their reporting behavior seems to be more in line with facade building than the idea of providing a comprehensive account. By adapting a multiperspective theoretical discourse about the potential and shortcomings of SR to the NGO context, the study contributes to a field-specific theory-based pluralistic critical evaluation of SR as a major cross-sectoral innovation in voluntary accountability initiatives. Keywords Content analysis Critical accounting research GRI NGO sector supplement Nongovernmental organizations Sustainability reporting
& Albert Anton Traxler [email protected] Dorothea Greiling [email protected] Hannah Hebesberger [email protected] 1
Institute of Management Accounting, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
Introduction and Research Question In the past decades, accountability pressure on non-governmental organizations (NGO) has increased considerably. NGOs are no longer obviously regarded as trustworthy. Rendering account has become a highly salient issue for most NGOs including the necessity to become more transparent for their own social and environmental performance (Crespy and Miller 2011; Gugerty 2009; Manetti and Toccafondi 2014; Unerman and O’Dwyer 2010). Highly publicized scandals—bad lemon problems— apparent or real mission drifts and changing government relationships in the wave of new public management reforms have contributed to this (Conway et al. 2015; Murtaza 2012; Schmitz et al. 2012). In addition, NGOs have been quite active in lobbying for an improved social and environmental accountability of for-profits. Nowadays, they are confronted with the demand to account for their own sustainability performance (Crespy and Miller 2011; Simaens and Koster 2013). Accountability is an elusive multidimensional concept with multiple facets and many faces (Ebrahim 2010). According to Bovens (2007: 450), accountability is ‘‘a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has the obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgments and the actor may face consequences.’’ With re
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