Storm Brandon Watson, Elroy Eugene Smith
Abstract
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting emerged as an essential part of assessing and demonstrating an organisation’s sustainable and ethical practices to its stakeholders. The aim of this paper is to conduct an in-depth desktop analysis of the sustainability reporting of eight organisations in South Africa from an ESG perspective. To achieve this aim, the interpretivism research paradigm and qualitative research approach were deemed most appropriate for this study. Secondary data such as online websites and published sustainability reports from eight organisations were scrutinised as to identify common ESG themes or categories of reporting. The main overall findings illustrate that organisations implement some ESG metrices as to illustrate their sustainable impact on the environment, society and governance practices. The findings also offer some useful and practical guidelines for organisations to improve their ESG reporting to stakeholders.