Stakeholders’ Engagement in Sustainability Reporting

Sustainability reporting is a key activity for organizations to inform stakeholders on their sustainable strategy and attendant efforts to put it into practice. Despite the existing guidelines for sustainability reporting, and specifically those by the Global Reporting Initiative, stress the importance of stakeholder engagement in identifying the relevant sustainability topics (which are called material aspects), to our knowledge the literature does not provide a structured procedure to combine the different stakeholders’ assessments, so as to identify material aspects. In this paper we propose an approach to deal with such a group decision making problem, based on the additive weighted aggregation of the stakeholders’ verbal assessments.