ABSTRACT
This chapter is less about that most risky of enterprises – predicting the future – and more about identifying current trends and evaluating them. It seeks to explore where corporate sustainability reporting appears to be headed and whether or not we should be pleased by this. The first part of the chapter focuses on what is being reported, how it is being reported and by whom. It provides an overview of developments in reporting practice since the 1990s, drawing mostly on secondary sources (including the published academic and professional literature, benchmarking analyses and other surveys of reporting practice). We then seek to extrapolate these trends a little. The second part of the chapter takes a more critical look at corporate sustainability reporting. It seeks to assess what corporate sustainability reporting has achieved and what it could possibly achieve. We also seek to explain what we believe it cannot achieve. We will consequently argue that efforts to promote corporate sustainability reporting need to be tempered with a clear understanding of both its existing and its potential limitations. Sustainability is too important to be left to the vagaries of self-reporting and non-critical descriptive study and so there is a constant need to subject all developments in this field to the most robust of criticisms.
