Global Reporting Initiative: Literature review and research directions

Sustainability reporting will soon become a common practice in organizations of all sizes and sectors, driven by escalating pressures and evolving stakeholders’ expectations. By analyzing 90 high-quality peer-reviewed articles, this systematic literature review aims to explore the state of research on the Global Reporting Initiative , which is the most widely adopted corporate sustainability reporting tool, and to provide critical thinking on the issues related to the reporting practice. Results are classified in an antecedent-process-outcome framework and interactions between the clusters are provided in a micro-meta-macro setting to develop discussions and insights for future research. The findings suggest that the overall research on the Global Reporting Initiative is well-developed. However, the misalignment of private and public short and long-term interests that emerged from the analysis may be a reason for the existence of unintended disclosure behaviors and quality issues in reporting, such as greenwashing . Accordingly, future research directions are developed to bridge the identified gap.