The concept of sustainable development has become dominant in the current socio‐economic debate at the global level. In particular, environmental issues have become increasingly central in the action of all organisations: private, public, and hybrid. Analysing a sample of Italian public utilities, we studied the level of disclosure regarding environmental topics via public Facebook pages. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of Web 2.0 on municipally owned public utilities' voluntary disclosure of environmental issues and stakeholder interest in this field. The findings show that the use of Facebook by public utilities to disclose environmental issues is still at an early stage. However, it is constantly growing, especially in the larger companies and in those with mixed public/private ownership.

Abstract:The role of public-sector organizations (PSOs) in promoting the agenda of sustainability accounting and accountability is not often adequately considered. In the public sector realm, local governments are close to their communities and thus have a particularly important role to play in the pursuit of sustainability goals. Hence, further research is needed to understand if Local Government Organizations (LGOs) are using reporting tools to promote sustainable development. The empirical data showed that the Sustainability Report (SR) is not being as widely used as in past years. Over time, the majority of Italian municipalities have not initiated or continued sustainability reporting due to some barriers including cost reduction, voluntariness, and low SR effectiveness. The findings suggest the popularity of SRs in Italy is falling and the SR tool appears to be "mere trend reporting based on descriptive indicators leading to decreasing interest from internal and external audiences". The carrot has been unsuccessful. Perhaps the implementation of mandatory requirements could alternatively be used as a stick.

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The cooperatives produce around 10% of Italian GDP. They should face two aims: the respect of the cooperative principles and their pursuit in line with the economic effectiveness principle. Cooperatives operate on the principles of the International Cooperative Alliance: one member-one vote, free and voluntary membership, and limited remuneration of the underwritten capital. In order to represent the social and the economic impact of the cooperatives actions, the evaluations of the outcome produced should bear in mind both dimensions above-mentioned. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all the purposes. The aim of the paper is to hypothesize a comprehensive evaluation model that allows to estimate the cooperative excellence. The emerging model will be made up of two parts representing the social and the economic excellence in turn divided in “internal” and “external” variables depending on the stakeholder considered. In the second part of the paper, the model will be tested on eight Italian cooperatives.

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