KiwiGrow1– a New Approach to Sustainable Development Reporting

Abstract

Social responsibility reporting and triple bottom line sustainability reporting are becoming more common, as businesses and organisations respond to factors such as pressures from stakeholders, the demands of ethical investors, and high profile instances of corporate ethical failure. Despite the availability of helpful guidelines, such as those of the Global Reporting Initiative, this reporting faces challenges which critically undermine its credibility as a means to assure sustainable development: uncertainty about the purpose and required content of the reporting, variable quality and comparability, lack of centrality to corporate decision-making, doubts about the impacts and effectiveness of reporting, and concerns about the paradigm on which reporting should be based. KiwiGrow™ is a collaborative accreditation system for management services for sustainable development, based on accurate and consistent implementation of a new, universal model for ecosystem health. The 28-sector KiwiGrow framework for assessment of community and environmental health arose from the search for system qualities that could completely describe the health of human-dominated ecosystems, and which were equally applicable in social, economic, environmental and cultural contexts. Healthy ecosystems are nurturing, supportive, stable, contributing, responsive, directed, and adaptive. Consideration of these seven qualities in the four major contexts provides a robust, easily understood framework for ‘quadruple bottom line’ sustainability reporting, in line with New Zealand's new local government legislation. This article presents a critique of current corporate sustainability reporting practice, and shows how KiwiGrow could underpin a new, revitalised, accountability for sustainable development.