Sustainable Performance Measurement in Public Sectors - A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic review of the literature on how sustainable performance is measured and reported in the public sector. Analyzing 22 studies published in a period of 5 years (from 2017 to 2021), the author addresses two simple but meaningful questions: How is the recent stream of literature on environment sustainability reported on in the public sector? And, what are the common measurement methods for the phenomenon? The findings indicate that public organizations mostly choose to adopt the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to report their sustainable or environmental performance; and given the crucial role, researches on environmental and sustainable performance of public sectors are still much lagging behind compared to the private sectors. The author also proposes several insights for public organizational performance improvement.