Mapping sustainability reporting research with the UN's sustainable development goal

Abstract

Non-financial reporting (NFR) has become crucial to corporate sustainability strategies as companies demonstrate their commitment to the environmental, social, and governance actions outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda 2030. Among the various mandatory NFR initiatives, Sustainability Reporting (SR) has emerged as a widely adopted practice by companies worldwide. A gap that the study addresses is the theoretical perspectives on SR in the context of SDG. Then we conduct a bibliometric and science mapping analysis of research trends on SR and precisely map SR research to SDGs which is also a gap in the current literature. We find an exponential increase in the number of publications and citations on SR, particularly after 2015, which coincides with increased public awareness and scrutiny of the SDGs. At the country level, Australia leads with a total of 13 SDGs, followed by the UK, Spain, and Italy, which each address 12 SDGs. Emerging economies such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India have also increased their contributions since 2019. A keyword co-occurrence analysis identified three main clusters: stakeholder engagement, corporate governance, and accountability; sustainable development goals and climate change; and sustainability reporting and global reporting initiatives. All three clusters had highly cited publications related to SDG 8 (decent work), SDG 9 (industry innovation), and SDG 12 (responsible consumption). This highlights the interdisciplinary nature of SR and its relevance to multiple SDGs. The study is distinctive in that we utilized social network analysis to examine the SDG network based on SR publications, which also affirmed the centrality of SDG 9 and 12. We utilized the prominence percentile, which indicates the momentum of a particular topic, to identify future topics in SR that align with the SDGs. These include cause-related marketing, environmentally preferable purchasing decisions, environmental management systems, education for sustainability, and green computing.

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