Resumo

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Agenda 2030, which is a blueprint for sustainable development with a focus on people, planet, and prosperity. As part of the Agenda 2030, there are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are 17 goals and 169 targets to combat climate change, balance economic, social and environmental development, as well as reduce poverty and gender inequality, among others aspects.

Although previous studies have already revealed some factors that affect the disclosure of the SDGs, there is still a gap that pertains to the relationships between stakeholders’ pressures, from a macroeconomic point of view, and the disclosure of the SDGs. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of secondary stakeholder pressures on SDG disclosure.

The literature suggests that businesses are facing increasing pressures to become socially responsible (Tura et al., 2019). Stakeholder pressure has been identified as one of the key factors contributing to the adoption of sustainability practices by companies (Barnett et al., 2018; Jakhar et al., 2020). These studies highlight the growing importance of social responsibility and sustainability in the business world, emphasizing the need for companies to address the concerns and expectations of their stakeholders in order to remain competitive and gain societal acceptance.

We examine the SDG disclosure of 1831 companies from 9 countries for the period 2016 to 2019, and considered as secondary stakeholders the government, society, unions, and the media. Our dependent variable is the disclosure of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The independent variables represent the secondary stakeholders (government, society, unions, and the media). Employing panel data analysis with fixed effects, we analyze the impact of secondary stakeholder pressures on SDG disclosure.

The overall findings show that society's participation and freedom of the press, are antecedents of greater disclosure of SDGs by companies in environmentally sensitive sectors. However, when excluding the US firms, the freedom of the press and the level of unionization seem to have a negative impact on SDG disclosure. This may well be related to the weight of China and India in the sample, given that they have very lower levels of press freedom and higher levels of unionization, represent the majority of the companies in the sample without the US companies.

Our evidence indicates that in societies where people have greater participation, companies are more engaged with the SDGs. Our study also reveals that in economies where the media is freer from political and economic interference, companies have greater disclosure of SDGs. Therefore, from an eagle's eye view, this study concludes that stakeholders are important keys to business decisions and actions on the SDGs.

Nonet, G.AH., Gössling, T., Van Tulder, R. et al. (2022). Multi-stakeholder Engagement for the Sustainable Development Goals: Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal of Business Ethics, 180, 945–957. Rosati, F., & Faria, L. G. D. (2019). Addressing the SDGs in sustainability reports: The relationship with institutional factors. Journal of Cleaner Production, 215, 1312–1326.