Corporate Transparency--A Report of the View of Sustainability Experts

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

GlobeScan/SustainAbility publishes about five reports a year that analyze expert perspectives on a range of business and sustainability topics. On 25 August 2014 GlobalScan/SustainAbility released its  - Findings from a new GlobeScan/SustainAbility Survey of industry experts on corporate transparency and specifically on how transparency drives performance. Their press release notes

Sustainability experts often point to stakeholder engagement and enhanced reputation as some of the benefits of corporate transparency. This survey reveals that corporate transparency brings even more value to companies. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents indicated that corporate transparency positively impacts a company’s sustainability performance. While there are barriers to transparency driving change within companies, there are a number of transparency practices that can help better guide decision making and work towards sustainable change.

SustainAbility was  founded in 1987.  They describe themselves as evolving "alongside the broader sustainability agenda and helped to define and shape the unique role of business within it.  On issues from consumption, transparency, stakeholder engagement and strategy to innovation and transformation, we've helped hundreds of clients and partners better understand and create business and societal value in response to global challenges." 

Globalscan describes itself thus: "for twenty-five years, GlobeScan has helped clients measure, understand and build valuable relationships with their stakeholders, and to work collaboratively in delivering a sustainable and equitable future. Uniquely placed at the nexus of reputation, brand and sustainability, GlobeScan partners with clients to build trust, drive engagement and inspire innovation within, around and beyond their organizations."

This post includes some of the findings from the report.  They are interesting and their consequences are worth thinking about.



The Introduction explains:

Sustainability experts often point to stakeholder engagement and enhanced reputation as some of the benefits of corporate transparency. This survey reveals that corporate transparency brings even more value to companies. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents indicated that corporate transparency positively impacts a company’s sustainability performance. While there are barriers to transparency driving change within companies, there are a number of transparency practices

that can help better guide decision making and work towards sustainable change.

SustainAbility is producing an in-depth report that explores the role of transparency in driving performance and will use the Globescan/SustainAbility 2014 Transparency Survey results to inform the analysis. We will make this report available to survey participants in December 2014.

The Report also notes that "Out of 13 choices, mandatory non-financial reporting requirements and increased demand among investors for integrated reporting are the two most cited potential solutions to further enable transparency to bring about greater progress toward sustainability within companies." (Report p. 5).

The greatest barrier to transparency included poor data accuracy and failure to focus on material issues.  (Ibid., 7).  This certainly mirrors the sense that absent the construction of a uniform, predictable and accepted set of reporting standards, including generally accepted principles for the harvesting and reporting of data--the efforts at sustainability reporting remain more gesture than useful. 

No surprises here. In a world that is dominated by cultures of financial reporting, where the structures and practices of financial reporting represent both the privileges set of normative values about corporate governance and operation; where that reporting essentially provides the means through which such economic aggregations are incarnated; where the methodologies of reporting set the standard for the authority of the subject reported, it seems only logical that until sustainability reporting, in whatever form embraced, adopts the cultural patterns and practices of financial accounting and the reporting that proceeds from it, it will remain nothing more than an aspiration, bereft of anything but the structures of gestures and the failures of good intent without a system to make it real.