There are a number of strategies and frameworks/guidelines that have been developed at the Commonwealth Government level to provide direction and assistance to organizations. These frameworks rather than focusing on an integrated viewpoint of sustainability have focused on one component of sustainability, that is, environmental sustainability.
The National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) was implemented by the Commonwealth Government in 1992. This strategy provides broad strategic direction for government agencies to direct policy and decision-making in the area of ESD. Unfortunately, this offers little guidance to local government authorities as the focus is on Commonwealth government agencies. However, one specific objective that is targeted at local authorities is Objective 16:3 of the strategy. This objective requires all local government authorities to incorporate ecological sustainable strategies into their forward plans (Commonwealth of Australia 1992) but offers no guidance as to how this might be achieved.
This is an important point to consider – organizations seeking to be more sustainable need to ensure that they take such strategies into account in their strategic planning and reporting. However, organizations should not only consider their ecological strategies,
42 they need to go one step further and examine social and economic strategies to provide for an integrated and sustainable approach to strategic planning. By doing so, this would provide forward-looking and long-term sustainability strategies to be developed towards the ultimate goal of sustainable development. Such an approach will provide a sound overall direction in the development of a local government reporting framework in Australia.
Development of a Local Government Framework
Contribution Number 1: Incorporation of sustainable strategies into strategic
planning and reporting
The Commonwealth Government has also released two guidelines to assist both public and private sectors in the pursuit of environmental reporting, the first being the Framework for Public Environmental Reporting - An Australian Approach. The framework provides broad guidance in preparing public environmental reports for both the private and public sectors. Such guidance includes details on how to prepare and what to include in an environmental report and the key steps in generating such a report through the use of indicators (Commonwealth of Australia 2000).
The second environmental guideline was released in June 2003 (A Guide to Reporting against Environmental Indicators) to assist both the public and private sectors in the development of environmental reporting using indicators (Commonwealth of Australia 2003 page 4). The indicators provided in the report were aligned to the internationally developed GRI guidelines (2002) environmental indicators. The GRI is regarded as the major source of guidance today for sustainability reporting (Brown et al. 2009; Adams and Frost 2007). As such, it was felt that the indicators would provide consistency with the GRI while reporting in such a manner that focuses on Australian needs and conditions (p. 62).
43 Two additional documents were expected to be released later in 2003/2004 by the
Commonwealth Government1; one to be focused on the development of social reporting
using indicators and the other focused on economic reporting using indicators2. A limited release draft document for social indicators was released in 2003; however, it was developed no further. No further documents have since been released.
On review of the two released documents (Framework for Public Environmental Reporting and A Guide to Reporting against Environmental Indicators), it is concluded that neither document develops a foundational reporting basis that would help to drive and make changes towards a more sustainable organization. Rather, the reporting approach of the two documents is based around the selection of environmental indicators to report against. Whilst indicators are useful in helping to identify and explain, such an approach to reporting does little to indicate how sustainable the organization actually is, how an organization is working towards achieving sustainable development and at what point an organization moves from being ‘unsustainable’ to ‘sustainable’. In doing so, there is the risk that such a reporting approach can lead to little more than the report being treated as just ‘another report’ by both organizations and stakeholders alike. If an approach to sustainability reporting in local government is to be developed, it needs to look much wider than the approach adopted in these two documents; it needs to be reporting that tells a story towards the goal of sustainable development. Therefore, these two reporting frameworks will not be considered in the development of a framework for local government.
The Local Government and Planning Minister’s Council (LGPM)3
released three national frameworks in March 2007. They are the ‘Criteria for Assessing Financial Sustainability Framework’, the ‘Asset Planning and Management Framework’ and the ‘Financial Planning and Reporting Network’. In May 2009, two up-dated frameworks were provided, entitled the ‘Enhanced National Framework on Asset Planning and
1 Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) 2
‘A Guide to Social Indicators and Methodologies’ and ‘A Guide to Economic Indicators and Methodologies’.
3 Made up of Local Government and Planning Ministers from across Australia and New Zealand, as well
44 Management’ and the ‘Enhanced National Framework on Financial Planning and Reporting’.
It was believed that, depending on the extent of their adoption in the various jurisdictions, these frameworks have the potential to provide information to assess local government performance and reporting in future years (Department of Transport and Regional Services 2007). However, on review of these frameworks, they provide few insights into new ways of moving forward in the area of sustainable development for local government – rather, they promote the application of basic financial accounting principles to provide for consistency in planning and reporting across local government. The above documents provide little structure or frame of reference to guide local government in the development of an integrated sustainability reporting approach. For sustainability to be achieved, frameworks need to be developed that encompass and integrate the three components of sustainability. Sustainability cannot be achieved by the lone pursuit of one component – it must be integrated across multiple objectives of an organization.
In looking from a broader perspective, there are private sector initiatives that have been developed at an international level to help guide sustainability reporting today. These frameworks and guidelines are now discussed with a particular emphasis on specific frameworks that target the public sector and if any could assist in the development of a local government framework.