Is water management really transparent? A comparative analysis of ESG reporting of Andalusian publicly-owned enterprises

IMPACT

This article reveals a low commitment of Andalusian publicly-owned enterprises with environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. The results will be useful for practitioners in public water utilities and other GOEs to improve their level of disclosures. The authors stress that managers need to be trained with the skills necessary to provide a better level of ESG disclosure. In addition, managers, along with regulators and policy-makers, need to work together to introduce realistic forcing mechanisms in current and future regulations to enhance their compliance with mandatory ESG reporting requirements.

ABSTRACT

This article analyses environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting by municipally-owned water companies and how it differs from the way other government-owned enterprises report. This article contributes to the literature in two main ways: it examines how the notion of hybridity can impact on ESG disclosures in GOEs and responds to the call by accounting scholars for the use of hybridity framework to provide insights into ESG reporting activity in GOEs.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• ESG reporting
• hybridity
• institutional logics
• government-owned enterprises (GOEs)
• public water utilities

Acknowledgement

This article is a part of a research project funded by the FEDER Operational Program Andalusia 2014-2020 (Research Project FEDER-UCA18-107740).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).