University sustainability assessment and reporting: preliminary findings from the Italian context

Abstract

With universities playing a key role in creating and promoting sustainable development, they are inevitably called upon to report to stakeholders their active commitment to facing social and environmental issues using comprehensive and clear reporting tools. GRI Standards provide guidelines to help write these reports, yet these can lead universities to prepare heterogeneous documents that are difficult to understand and compare in terms of both information and results. Considering Italian state universities, this paper examines the materiality matrix, a tool used to disclose social, environmental and economic efforts toward the stakeholders. Preliminary results seem to show that somehow universities have misunderstood the GRI 2016 guidelines concerning the materiality matrix. The paper concludes by outlining the limitations of the study and offering suggestions for future research.