Building normativity in sustainability reporting: from national to EU - level regulations

This chapter aims to conceptualise the process of building normativity in the field of sustainability reporting (SR). An overview of national-level and European Union (EU)-level regulations is offered to provide a better understanding of how SR was institutionalised in the EU. Moreover, the chapter provides insights, based on the normativity production concept (Bebbington et al., 2012), as a way to build norms in institutionalised settings. It presents four main messages learned from the research on voluntary and mandatory disclosure in normativity production: i) “norm” production within entities is not the result of new regulations that come into force but is the outcome of a learning process that starts from voluntarily experiencing SR; ii) new and future regulations should consider SMEs’ dimensions, skills, capabilities and their need to learn new reporting mechanisms; iii) stakeholder engagement and the consultation process can enhance a more collaborative and dialogic form of accountability; and iv) in the interplay between normativity and standardisation, both technical and non-technical dimensions should be put into practice, focusing on the process instead of the outcome.