Corporate Reporting Frameworks

This chapter provides a broad picture of the most important evaluation and reporting systems of corporate social, environmental and sustainability performance. The starting point of the analysis is the concept of accountability that directly derives from the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR): according to a stakeholder view of the firm a company is held accountable for its actions to the different constituencies. Therefore, if companies want to manage environmental, social and governance issues and obtain the trust of their stakeholders, they must not only communicate, but also give concrete evidence that they are committed to continual, long-term improvement. Thus, companies increasingly need appropriate systems to measure and control their own behaviour in order to assess whether they are responding to stakeholder concerns in an effective way and to communicate the results achieved. These new accounting and reporting systems have the purpose of broadening and integrating the traditional financial approaches to the corporate performance measurement, taking stakeholder needs into due account. The most advanced methodologies aim at monitoring and tracking from a qualitative and quantitative viewpoint the overall corporate performance according to a triple bottom line approach and/or a stakeholder framework.