Social and environmental reports at universities: a Habermasian view on their evolution

This paper analyses how social and environmental disclosure has evolved over the years in Italian universities and aims to understand whether attention to sustainable development has changed. To determine this evolution, this study employed a framework of analysis that included 56 indicators based on the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines, embedding aspects of teaching and research as distinctive for universities. Inspired by Habermas’s writings, the study indicates that, despite the tendency to provide improved discourse on sustainable development, the lack of appropriate guidelines for universities does not facilitate discourse evolution on this issue in the higher education lifeworld.