Quality Disclosure in Sustainability Reporting: Evidence From Universities

Abstract

Attention towards sustainability reporting is very high with reference to higher education. The paper aims to assess the maturity level of sus-tainability reporting and to measure its quality by evaluating the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators currently disclosed. The research was carried out using the inductive method. We de-limited the study to universities and we evaluated the quality of sustainability reporting by analyzing the indicators disclosed in 2012 reports accord-ing to GRI guidelines. The research gives an overview of sustainability reporting in universities by evaluating the quality level of their disclosure. The results confrm previous research by high-lighting the necessity to improve sustainability reporting. Moreover, the results show there are differences between universities that are con-nected to the peculiarities of each country. They also enable us to draw up an initial classifcation of universities. The paper provides one of the frst in-depth studies of sustainability reporting quality for universities included in the GRI database.

Keywords

• sustainability reporting, gri in-dicators, universities, quality assessment.