Moving from Social and Sustainability Reporting to Integrated Reporting: Exploring the Potential of Italian Public-Funded Universities’ Reports

Abstract

Over recent years, the meaning of accountability has evolved and has reshaped what public sector institutions are expected to account for and how. Consequently, a large number of initiatives have emerged promoting non-financial reporting. In this context, public universities have started to experiment with sustainability reporting initiatives, but these efforts are still limited and challenged by the parallel development of multiple forms of reporting, which include integrated reporting (IR). IR has been interpreted as a further step in the reporting journey, suitable for representing the creation of public value and addressing accountability pressures. The current research aims at understanding if and how IR constitutes a feasible next step for improving the reporting practices of public universities. For this purpose, the research carries out a content analysis of social or sustainability reports written by a number of Italian public universities to find out which of the key elements of IR have already been included in such reports. Results show that some of those elements are already included, but often in a fragmented and non-homogeneous way. The findings pave the way for further considerations on how the potential adoption of IR may strengthen the value of social and sustainability reporting by integrating the information reported in different documents, fostering toward a bureaucracy that is more sustainable and providing more opportunities of innovation in reports on public sector organizations' accountability.

Operationalizing public value in higher education: the use of narratives as an alternative for performance indicators

“…In recent literature, attention has also been paid to various methods within universities (Alach, 2017;Mauro et al, 2020) to assess the accountability (Nicolo et al, 2020) of public value creation (Grossi et al, 2021;Kallio and Kallio, 2014;Iacuzzi et al, 2020). Without exception, however, they indicate that more research is necessary in testing these methods and see if this fits with the practice of a specific university.…”

Sustainability Reporting in the Public Realm—Trends and Patterns in Knowledge Development

“…This stream of research includes studies focused on the analyzed topic in several organizations of the public sector, such as universities [5,15,31,36,37,[42][43][44][45], local governments [32,[46][47][48][49], hospitals [12,50,51] and state-owned enterprises [7,13,52,53], using GRI standards and/or <IR> framework. The heterogeneity of these entities and the reporting guidelines approached suggests how academics have tried to identify contributions to sustainability reporting in the public sector from different perspectives.…”

Explorando la divulgación de información integrada por universidades colombianas. Un análisis de páginas web basado en el marco del IIRC

“…Recientemente, Mauro et al (2020) revisaron los informes de sostenibilidad de las universidades públicas italianas para encontrar qué elementos del IR habían sido incluídos en tales reportes. Sus resultados muestran que hay una alta inclusión de elementos del marco, aunque de una manera poco homogenea y fragmentada.…”

“…Se incluyeron seis elementos verificadores relacionados con las principales actividades de la organización y se obtuvo un índice de cumplimiento de 91% para esta unidad de análisis, con índices parciales de divulgación situados entre el 100% y el 82%, como se muestra en el gráfico 3. Este resultado concuerda con el estudio realizado por Mauro et al (2020), teniendo en cuenta que dada su naturaleza las universidades divulgan la información relacionada con las inversiones y resultados obtenidos en innovación, patentes y en general con la investigación.…”