Social and Sustainability Reporting in Italian Local Governments: What is not Reported?

Internationally, social and sustainability reporting has been widely debated (Adams and McNicholas 2007), both within the academic literature and at a political and practical level. Within this debate, the accounting and reporting techniques used are also central to discussions about sustainability (Unerman, Guthrie, and Striukova 2007). The various Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines (GRI 2006) are of particular interest because of their attempts to provide an international framework of reporting for all types of organisations. In Italy, a recent study demonstrated that there is a trend for Italian local governments to produce social reports, with 14 percent of municipalities and 38 percent of provinces producing social reports in 2005 (Siboni 2007). The current study aims to explore the social reporting in a selection of “better practice” Italian local government organisations and, in particular, to observe what has and has not been reported in comparison to the GRI guidelines. It uses an analytical framework developed in a prior study, in which the voluntary sustainability practices of a sample of Australian public sector organisations were examined (Guthrie and Farneti 2008). The specifi c research questions considered are: 1. What has been reported in Italian local government social reports? 2. What has or has not been reported in terms of the GRI guidelines? This examination of Italian local government organisations establishes that their stand-alone social reports are actually “social reports” in name only. There were relatively few environmental, social, labour, product, or wider societal disclosures when compared to the GRI guidelines.