Is sustainability reporting disclosing what is relevant? Assessing materiality accuracy in the Spanish telecommunication industry

Raúl León and Aitor Salesa ()
Additional contact information
Raúl León: University of Zaragoza
Aitor Salesa: University of Zaragoza

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2024, vol. 26, issue 8, No 93, 21433-21460

Abstract: Abstract Companies have highly adopted sustainability reporting practices. Nonetheless, there are still some important research gaps related to the contents that sustainability reports should include and the appropriate frameworks to define them. This research contributes to the study of sustainability reporting practices of companies from a sectorial perspective, and it is focused on applying the materiality principle. It combines a qualitative and a quantitative approach to assess the materiality and the quality of GRI reports among sustainability dimensions and companies within an industry. To this end, an innovative research method based on scores is proposed and applied to a sample of companies in the telecommunications industry. The results indicate that while the GRI sustainability issues declared as material are more likely to be reported, there are still incoherencies in using materiality analysis as a threshold for reporting. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the materiality or quality of the reports differs among companies or sustainability dimensions. The findings suggest that materiality analysis, as companies present it, may lead to incoherencies in treating GRI aspects and indicators.

Keywords: Social accounting; Materiality analysis; Sustainability; Reporting; The telecommunications industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-023-03537-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:26:y:2024:i:8:d:10.1007_s10668-023-03537-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-023-03537-x

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().