Page 179 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

162 C. Herzig and S. Schaltegger

international standards increasingly applied for the assurance of sustainability
reports are the International Standard on Assurance Engagements 3000 of the
International Federation of Accountants and the Assurance Standard AA1000 of the
Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability. At a national level, standards include
for example the German auditing standard ‘Generally accepted assurance standards
for the audit or review of sustainability reports’ and the Dutch standard RL 3410 on
assurance engagements relating to sustainability reports. In other European coun-
tries such as France, Spain and Sweden (and outside Europe in countries such as
Australia, China, and Japan) similar country-specific standards have been drafted or
published by national accountancy bodies.
The contribution assurance practice is making towards enhancing the level of
environmental and social accountability to the stakeholders of companies has been
called into question by a number of studies. O’Dwyer and Owen’s (2008) review of
the growing body of work in this field reveals the limited contribution to promoting
greater transparency and true accountability to the stakeholder due to ambiguities
and inconsistencies in current approaches to sustainability assurance practice (such as
independence and degree of thoroughness of audits, managerial control over the whole
assurance process, and great uncertainties in understanding the relationship between
actual performance and aspects covered by the assurance process). They point out that
unless institutional reform empowers stakeholders, i.e. transfers some degree of power
over the assurance process from companies to stakeholders and institutes more par-
ticipatory forms of corporate governance, it is difficult to avoid concluding that little
or no value has been added to the assurance process. Whether the developments in
mandatory sustainability reporting will further more sophisticated standards for the
assurance of sustainability reports (UNEP et al. 2010) remains to be seen.
A particular challenge for the assurance of sustainability reporting lies in web
content as no standard for assessing and certifying web content exists and informa-
tion on the Internet can be changed quite easily. However, the limitations of printed
reports as discussed in the next section has encouraged companies to turn to the
more expansive possibilities provided by the Internet.

Internet Support

When reviewing studies of online sustainability reporting over the last 10 years or
so, it becomes obvious that there has been an overall increase in using the Internet
for sustainability reporting (e.g. Herzig and Godemann 2010; Morhardt 2010).
Greater use of this new communication approach is often attributed to its advan-
tages in providing more sustainability information and increasing information
accessibility and comprehensibility (Adams and Frost 2006; Herzig and Godemann
2010). With the media-specific linking possibilities and the use of the HTML for-
mat, reporting is for example no longer limited by the number of printed pages.
A large quantity of information, including historical company information and links
to other information sources related to the company or to other organisations can
be offered online without necessarily creating a ‘carpet bomb’ for the reader.