GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for Public and Third Sector Organizations: A Critical Review

GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for Public and Third Sector Organizations: A Critical Review

This article takes a close look at GRI guidelines while providing a critique and suggesting alternatives. This is perhaps not too different from the research article that we are looking to write about STARS reporting, albeit ours more comparative. Also, Dumay et al. focus on the public and third sectors, which includes the vast majority of colleges and universities in the US.

Separate researcher, Rob Gray, outlines three classifications of sustainability reporting (Gray 2006):

1. Managerialist – data is selectively reported based on the assumption that there are no conflicts between traditional economic criteria and those relating to social and environmental aspects (Dumay et al. 2010).

2. Triple Bottom Line – data is an equal and reliable balance, within the annual report, between economic, social and environmental activities (Dumay et al. 2010).

3. Ecological and Eco-Justice – data focused on establishing whether or not organizations act as socially and environmentally sustainable members of society (Dumay et al. 2010).

Dumay et al. argue that GRI takes a Managerialist approach and explain why corporate sustainability should take an Ecological and Eco-Justice point of view. In their point of view, organizations need to operate under the assumption that they are inherently unsustainable – their economic and environmental goals will contradict. Organizations would rather tell their sustainability “narrative” rather than cater to abstract indicators, so they should create their own criteria for sustainability not based on any pre-existing framework. Focusing on managerialist data leads to greenwashing marketing and inward-looking policies that avoid any tangible changes. Dumay et al. suggests an Ecological and Eco-Justice report in order to develop practices that provide changes “not only [for] themselves, but also at an ecosystems level” (Dumay et al. 2010).

Before starting, it is important to note that this review was written in 2010 about an older edition of GRI and critiques made may no longer be relevant. That being said, this critique of GRI has some solid points, but I’m certainly not on-board with their suggested Ecological and Eco-Justice perspective. I like the idea of a sustainability narrative to explain efforts, this would show transparency and only cater to the values of an institution, but this seems as accomplishing separate goals as a quantitative and analytical assessment system and does not help to limit abstractions. Yet, a narrative could be a great way for an organization to communicate to its customers in addition to an assessment.

In addition, I am left unconvinced of the argument that the focus on organizational sustainability is leads to less impact than ecological sustainability. Dumay et al. provide no empirical data to suggest this and I am not convinced that organizational sustainability couldn’t achieve even more tangible changes that would benefit the both the organization internally and its external environment. I would be interested in looking into actually changes that occurred after using GRI’s assessment.