Sidosryhmien odotukset ja yritysten raportoima kestävyysinformaatio CSRD viitekehyksessä

The new European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and related European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) aim, among other objectives, to ensure that corporate sustainability reporting (SR) meets the information needs of stakeholders. A significant part of the new SR directive is the double materiality assessment (DMA), according to which companies themselves determine which topical standards they should report. Although there are precise guidelines for DMA, it nevertheless contains elements that are open to interpretation, and it is unclear which topical standards reported by companies correspond to stakeholders' perceptions of what is material. This study examines how companies have succeeded in reporting on topical standards that stakeholders consider material. The research data is based on a survey in which respondents made DMAs on the basis of limited information for ten Finnish listed companies. The survey responses are compared with the topical standards reported by the companies. In addition, the study analyses how the respondents' level of expertise, gender, and age group affect their assessments of materiality. The results show that companies and stakeholders are relatively consistent in their views on which topical standards companies should report on, suggesting that companies have mostly succeeded in reporting on areas of interest to stakeholders. The most significant differences are concentrated particularly in social and environmental standards, where determining the impacts is more complex and involves more consideration. The study also found that the level of expertise does not significantly affect the differences between stakeholders’ responses and companies’ reported standards, but gender and age group do. Younger respondents, compared to older, and female respondents, compared to male, are more likely to agree with companies on which topical standards companies should report. In addition, younger respondents rated an average of about 15 percentage points more topical standards as material to companies than older respondents. Most importantly, the study shows that double materiality under the CSRD is not merely a technical process, nor does it solve all the problems of SR. Regulation harmonizes the assessment of materiality, but discretion remains unavoidable, which is why SR is unlikely ever to meet the information needs of all stakeholders.