Global Reporting Initiative: Literature review and research directions

Sustainability reporting will soon become a common practice in organizations of all sizes and sectors, driven by escalating pressures and evolving stakeholders’ expectations. By analyzing 90 high-quality peer-reviewed articles, this systematic literature review aims to explore the state of research on the Global Reporting Initiative, which is the most widely adopted corporate sustainability reporting tool, and to provide critical thinking on the issues related to the reporting practice. Results are classified in an antecedent-process-outcome framework and interactions between the clusters are provided in a micro-meta-macro setting to develop discussions and insights for future research. The findings suggest that the overall research on the Global Reporting Initiative is well-developed. However, the misalignment of private and public short and long-term interests that emerged from the analysis may be a reason for the existence of unintended disclosure behaviors and quality issues in reporting, such as greenwashing. Accordingly, future research directions are developed to bridge the identified gap.