Background: The importance and significance of sustainability, including but not limited to climate change challenges, is evident in public discourse, policy making and in the strategies and priorities of public and private companies. All public and private organizations commit formally towards sustainability. As an illustration, NTNU’s mission statement herald the university’s role as “an agenda setter for change processes and sustainable development.»

Similarly, the European Union has developed a regime for corporate reporting of sustainability integrated with other public reporting that companies are already conducting called Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directorate (CSRD). For further details, see the EU directive, an overview and the legal text. The CSRD reporting includes detailed reporting on CO2 emissions, which also includes so-called scope 3 emissions that address indirect emissions throughout the whole value chain.

A key perspective in the Sustain project is, despite the regulative frameworks outlined above, the radical under-specification of exactly what aspects of the companies’ activities are covered, how to operationalize what data to underpin and for whom sustainability reporting is relevant and how (beyond complying with national and regional regulation).

If anything solid is supposed to melt into air, sustainability reporting appears to works in the opposite way in the sense of making (more) solid what seems (almost like) air, viz. the notion of ‘sustainability’. As such, sustainability reporting may be understood as an expression of what scholars have characterized as the audit society (Strathern 2000) or broader tendencies towards the discounting of the future (Doganova 2024).  Several have voiced critical perspectives about the nature of accounting practices. For instance, Power (1997) portrays the practices of accounting as largely symbolic hence ‘rituals’.

While relevant, the Sustain project in contrast explores how much more than empty gestures sustainability reporting is.  Understood as involving the quantification of the qualitative, the project expores how approximations of sustainability, beyond the formal and symbolic, may gain significance and relevance for particular stakeholders for particular purposes (Monteiro 2022).

Aims: The Sustain project aims at analyzing challenges with existing and proposed tools, routines to collect, aggregate, report and using sustainability data to address the concerns of stakeholders (such as: the public, the owners, the subcontractors, national and regional authorities, financial institutions, ranking agencies).

Organization: The Sustain project starts out as a collaboration between Aneo AS with Kathrine Vestues (kathrine.vestues@aneo.com) as a partner and NTNU with Eric Monteiro (https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/eric.monteiro ) as principal investigator. The project is recruiting additional resources, starting with master’s students. In addition, the project will collaborate with other projects to facilitate comparing and constrasting across companies and sectors.

The project is registred with SIKT, the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research.

References

Doganova, L., 2024. Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology. Princeton University Press.

Monteiro, E., 2022. Digital oil: Machineries of knowing. MIT Press.

Power, M., 1997. The audit society: Rituals of verification. OUP Oxford.

Strathern, M. Audit cultures. Vol. 146. London: Routledge, 2000.