Accountability through Sustainability Data Governance: Reconfiguring Reporting to Better Account for the Digital Acceleration

Abstract

Accountability assessment is a highly relevant challenge for companies nowadays. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a digital acceleration in business environments, which in turn brought more focus on sustainability practices that could help organizations better demonstrate their accountability, thus making them more resilient to the ever-changing socio-economic context. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate how to further improve corporate accountability (on a strategic and operational level), taking advantage of the digitalization changes that companies are being forced to go through and applying them to the sustainability evaluation process, including the reporting as its final output. The first research outcome is a combined framework, based on data governance and sustainability literature models, seeking to optimize the manageability of sustainability data. The second outcome is a matrix, based on a content analysis of 20 sustainability reports, representing eight possible types of behavior that companies adopt when integrating digitalization practices into their sustainability evaluation process. The aim is to explore how the communication of digital activities could refine the diligence of the sustainability assessment process, with disclosure representing its last step. Finally, the ‘leading’ case was broken down into the general strategic components that could potentially be included in a balanced data-sustainability reporting strategy.