Transparency in Global Environmental Governance: Critical Perspectives

10 Tamed Transparency and the Global Reporting Initiative: The Role of Information Infrastructures

10 Tamed Transparency and the Global Reporting Initiative: The Role of Information Infrastructures Klaus Dingwerth and Margot Eichinger The politics of information disclosure are often associated with high hopes.1 Disclosed information is expected to improve environmental performance, “thicken” democracy, and/or empower a broad range of stakeholders vis-à-vis corporations (for an overview, see Gupta and Mason , this book, chapter 1; Mol, this book, chapter 2). In this article, we investigate the “empowerment thesis” in relation to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a private transnational institution that explicitly aims to improve the quality of corporate sustainability disclosure. In doing so, we build on our earlier research on GRI disclosure (Dingwerth and Eichinger 2010), wherein we introduced the notion of tamed transparency and argued that the transformative potential of transparency as practiced in the GRI remained unfulfilled—and hence tamed—in several ways. First, the GRI remained ambivalent in its transparency language. More precisely, it failed to specify what constitutes transparency and what purposes transparency is meant to serve. Second, the information that different corporations disclosed in their GRI reports was largely not comparable. It was therefore of limited value for report users. Third, the information infrastructure surrounding the GRI remained weak. In contrast to disclosure schemes such as the US-based Toxic Release Inventory, few civil society actors gathered around the GRI to translate the data contained (and often hidden) in sustainability reports into more valuable, accessible, comprehensible , and comparable—in short, into more actionable—information. In this chapter, we extend our analysis of the GRI as a prime example of “tamed” rather than “targeted” transparency. We do so by developing further our argument regarding information structures and intermediaries surrounding GRI disclosure. More specifically, we go beyond an analysis of how civil society intermediaries use (or do not use) the information provided through GRI reports to consider the role of commercial intermediaries as well. In so doing, our interest here is in analyzing the 226 Klaus Dingwerth and Margot Eichinger broader information infrastructure within which the GRI, as one of the major sites of the transparency turn (Gupta and Mason, this book, chapter 1) in global environmental politics, is embedded. We do so in three broad steps. First, we briefly introduce the GRI and its place in the wider transparency turn. Second, we summarize—and update when appropriate—the empirical findings of our earlier study in relation to the transparency rhetoric and policies of the GRI and the comparability of actual GRI reports. Third, we discuss the extent to which two different types of commercial intermediaries—namely, financial investment consultancies such as IW Financial and MSCI and consumeroriented “for-benefit” corporations such as GoodGuide—contribute to making GRI-based information more valuable, accessible, comprehensible , and comparable. Our discussion shows that commercial intermediaries do make GRI reports more useful and add pressure on corporations to disclose more information about their social and environmental performance . At the same time, such “marketization” of transparency narrows the scope for noncommercial organizations. It makes it difficult for them to enter the field of information intermediaries with their own visions of how and to what end corporate transparency should be organized. Embracing Transparency The GRI was established as an independent nongovernmental organization in 2002 and is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It aims to develop and promote a coherent framework for nonfinancial reporting by corporations. To this end, the GRI regularly updates its Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in complex, multistakeholder processes that include the participation of business, organized civil society, labor, consultancies, academics, and representatives of governmental as well as intergovernmental organizations.2 The Sustainability Reporting Guidelines are at the core of the GRI reporting framework. We analyze the G3 (third generation) of these guidelines in this article. The G3 are composed of reporting principles and performance indicators. The reporting principles define the report content and quality and provide guidance on how to determine the boundary of a report. The performance indicators specify which aspects of an organization ’s activities and impacts are to be covered. The indicators embrace different substantive areas, including economic and environmental impacts , impacts on labor practices and human rights, and the broader issue of product responsibility. Examples include the economic indicator EC 4 Tamed Transparency and the Global Reporting Initiative 227 “Significant financial assistance received from government”; the environmental indicator EN 15 “Number of IUCN Red List species and national conservation list species with habitats in areas affected by...