Can Global Reporting Initiative reports reveal companies’ green supply chain management practices?

Abstract

Companies usually use Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reports as a typical way to make their sustainability commitment transparent to stakeholders, without being concerned with making green supply chain management (GSCM) practices transparent. Given that the generic approach of the GRI framework makes it difficult to identify where and how GSCM practices are presented, this paper assumes that these GSCM practices are in the company's GRI reporting but are not transparent. Consequently, how GRI reports can reveal companies' GSCM practices remains underexplored in the literature. Guided by a qualitative approach, this study exploited data from the GRI reports of 30 Brazilian companies to verify the degree of GSCM transparency. Specifically, we use a theoretical structured framework for GSCM practices, consisting of four dimensions and 20 practices distributed among them. Our findings show that the current way of reporting actions to enhance companies' contribution to sustainable development can partially promote GSCM transparency. The findings also indicate which practices could be better documented in GRI reports to increase the visibility of GSCM actions, providing insights for managers and scholars seeking to define strategies to make GSCM more observable (e.g. total quality environmental management, environmental compliance and auditing programs, cooperation with suppliers, and scrap selling). Furthermore, the theoretical linkage between the GRI and GSCM contributes to theory by presenting a novel view of GSCM practices' transparency through the generic GRI guidelines.