Environmental reporting and accountability in the Lazio Region between national guidelines and pilot experiences of local governments in Italy

Abstract

The need to support traditional annual financial balance sheets with environmental balance sheets is a strong priority for public organizations in order to communicate the use of public resources to their citizens through the processes of governance, and from the perspective of sustainable development. Currently environmental reports are still not widespread, yet a lot of social reporting experiences have taken place in regions, provinces and municipalities (at present over 150 nationally). APAT (the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services, now ISPRA), which coordinates a network of 20 regional environmental agencies, has recently begun a process to harmonize environmental reporting methods at a local level by analyzing the implemented experiences. This led to the formulation of the Guidelines for the preparation of reports on the state of environment at a local level. This work examines the experimental application of the methodological guidelines proposed by APAT for defining a model of integrated environmental reporting in the Lazio Region. In particular, the case study analysis of the regional government of Lazio is linked with a preliminary analysis based on the methodology of previous case studies carried out by the authors (investigating social reporting in Lombardia and Veneto (Veneto Region, 2003, 2004), not presented in this paper).