Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

During the past two decades the corporate social responsibility movement made the practice of issuing voluntary reports on sustainability performance by companies very popular. Created in1997 in Boston, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), through a partnership with The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and close links with International Standards Organization and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has become the best known and most prestigious set of guidelines for how such reports should be produced, with about a thousand adopters in 65 countries. This year ES&P professor Halina Brown will be completing a three year project, funded by a $320,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that examines the effectiveness of GRI in becoming a new type of global institution. Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands is Clark’s partner in this research.

One of the signatures of GRI is that the guidelines are produced through a collaborative effort of very diverse actors, including companies, financial institutions, accountancy organizations, civil society and labour organizations, and others. Another unique feature is that the guidelines are a perpetual work in progress, producing successive generations. Through this self-replicating multi-stakeholder process, GRI sought to institutionalize a global dialogue about what sustainability performance means, how to communicate it, and how to evaluate it.

The research project has examined the extent of institutionalization of the reporting practice among the producers and users of the reports. They tested whether it has contributed to the broad-based international dialogue on sustainability performance, analyzed the degree to which it has mobilized civil society, NGOs, the investment sector, and other public and private stakeholders, and scrutinized the sustainability performance of many companies. The project also performed a cross-country comparison of the institutionalization of GRI in the U.S., the Netherlands, Brazil, and France.

The research found that GRI has many characteristics of a mature institution. However, its contribution to strengthening the broader institutions of civil-private regulation is less clear. This case leads us to question one of the fundamental assumptions about information-based civil regulation: that standardized commodified information in itself can be an instrument for empowering and mobilizing various societal actors so long as it is produced by way of broad participation. For policy makers the lesson from the GRI story is that we should not look to civil-private regulations based on information disclosure (voluntary or not) and to multi-stakeholder partnerships as a substitute for direct government regulations. The so-called new forms of governance espoused in many quarters, based on partnership and civil engagement, by themselves are not likely to produce the types of progress toward sustainability that is needed.