Why and How Responsible Organisations Are Assessing Their Performance: State of the Practice in Environmental, Social and Governance Accounting

Abstract

Environmental, social and governance accounting (ESGA, also referred to as sustainability reporting) is becoming mainstream among organisations of all kinds. Its popularity has come hand by hand with an increasing offer of methods available in the market. Research has yet to catch up with this rate of method creation. This paper reports on an ongoing, long-term project aiming at creating a repository of existing ESGA methods, resulting from a multivocal literature review. We are also conducting a survey with ESGA method practitioners and consultants to investigate the motivations of organisations to apply ESGA methods to measure their sustainability performance. So far, we have collected information about 90 methods; for the sake of brevity, we elaborate on six of them. For a sample of 33 of them, we have analysed their documentation and metamodelled the method using the Process Deliverable Diagram technique; herein, we present the metamodel of the Common Good Balance Sheet, the ESGA method championed by the Economy for the Common Good network. Our investigation allows observing the sustainability reporting method landscape in all its breadth, fully understanding the inner mechanisms of each method, and finding commonalities and differences among methods. We expect that such rich data will pave the way for further research that eventually helps organisations perform in a more sustainable way.