Background: The importance and significance of sustainability, including but not limited to climate change challenges, is evident in public discourse, policy making and in the strategies and priorities of public and private companies. All public and private organizations commit formally towards sustainability. As an illustration, NTNU’s mission statement herald the university’s role as “an agenda setter for change processes and sustainable development.»

Similarly, the European Union has developed a regime for corporate reporting of sustainability integrated with other public reporting that companies are already conducting. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is an EU regulation that expands sustainability reporting requirements for companies, ensuring transparency on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. It mandates detailed disclosures, including CO₂ emissions across Scope 1, 2, and 3—where Scope 3 covers indirect emissions across the value chain. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) define the specific reporting framework under CSRD, setting disclosure requirements for corporate sustainability performance.

A key perspective in the Sustain project is, despite the regulative frameworks outlined above, the radical under-specification of exactly what aspects of the companies’ activities are covered, how to operationalize what data to underpin and for whom sustainability reporting is relevant and how (beyond complying with national and regional regulation).

If anything, solid is supposed to melt into air, sustainability reporting appears to work in the opposite way in the sense of making (more) solid what seems (almost like) air, viz. the notion of ‘sustainability’. As such, sustainability reporting may be understood as an expression of what scholars have characterized as the audit society (Strathern 2000) or broader tendencies towards the discounting of the future (Doganova 2024).  Several have voiced critical perspectives about the nature of accounting practices. For instance, Power (1997) portrays the practices of accounting as largely symbolic, hence referring to them as ‘rituals’.

While relevant, the Sustain project in contrast explores how much more than empty gestures sustainability reporting is.  Understood as involving the quantification of the qualitative, the project expores how approximations of sustainability, beyond the formal and symbolic, may gain significance and relevance for particular stakeholders for particular purposes (Monteiro 2022).

Aims: The Sustain project aims at analyzing challenges with existing and proposed tools, routines to collect, aggregate, report and using sustainability data to address the concerns of stakeholders (such as: the public, the owners, the subcontractors, national and regional authorities, financial institutions, ranking agencies).

The master's course BMRR4040 Sustainability Reporting, offered at NTNU Business School from autumn 2025, will build on knowledge generated by the Sustain project, contributing to its development and content.

Organization: The Sustain project began as a collaboration between Aneo AS, represented by Kathrine Vestues (contact), and NTNU’s Department of Computer Science, with Eric Monteiro (profile) as principal investigator. A similar collaboration is established between Koteng Eiendom and researchers at NTNU Business School, where studies are conducted on reporting processes in sustainability reporting. Co-Principal investigators are Anders Berg Olsen (profile) and Per Åhblom (profile). The Sustain project includes master’s theses where students conduct case studies on companies’ implementation of sustainability reporting in line with CSRD/ESRS, contributing to a broader understanding of reporting practices across industries and companies. The project is expanding by recruiting master’s students and collaborating with other initiatives to enable cross-sector comparisons.

The sub-projects that together constitute the Sustain project have been registered at SIKT, the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research.

References

Doganova, L., 2024. Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology. Princeton University Press.

Monteiro, E., 2022. Digital oil: Machineries of knowing. MIT Press.

Power, M., 1997. The audit society: Rituals of verification. OUP Oxford.

Strathern, M. Audit cultures. Vol. 146. London: Routledge, 2000.