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1. Introduction
In the past decades, the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable development (SD) have gained momentum as pivotal elements of value-creation and prosperity and as fundamental driving factors for the economy (United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2013; World Business Council for Sustainable Development, 2012). Both concepts have been incorporated into the 2030 agenda for SD released in 2015 by the United Nations, which defined 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 related targets as a comprehensive framework with which to deal, in an integrated and balanced manner, with the multiple facets of SD, such as climate change, human rights, corruption, poverty, inequalities and justice (UN, 2015). In accordance with the agenda, actors at all levels of society, from private to public sector organizations (hereafter PSOs), are called upon to embrace integrated sustainability concerns in their operations and strategies and to actively report their progress towards achieving the SDGs (Fonseca and Carvalho, 2019).
Special emphasis has been placed on CSR and SD concepts in the public sector because of the PSOs’ undeniable role in boosting SD (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018). The mission of the public sector is to create public value and to promote sustainability through adequate policies (Ball and Grubnic, 2007; Farneti et al., 2019).
In response, both private and public entities have progressively shifted the focus of their reporting, moving away from reports that are focussed solely on financial information, with a primary purpose to satisfy shareholders, towards more comprehensive types of reports, including social, environmental, sustainability and intangible issues, to meet the needs of a plethora of stakeholders (Dumay et al., 2010; Biondi and Bracci, 2018). The coming into force of the European Union (EU) Directive 95/2014 further encouraged this shift, forcing large EU undertakings, which are public-interest entities with more than 500 employees, to disclose non-financial and diversity information in their management report or in a stand-alone document (EU, 2014; La Torre et al., 2018).
In this new scenario, integrated reporting (IR) has gained prominence as an evolutionary step in organizations’ reporting, as it combines financial and non-financial information into a single document to create an advanced tool for sustainability reporting (Beck et al., 2017; Lai et al., 2018; Stacchezzini et al.