Sustainability regulation and global corporate citizenship: A lesson (already) learned?

The European Directive 2014/95, in force in 2017, requires non-financial information to all public interest entities with more than 500 employees. However, multinational companies as ‘global corporate citizen’ have already started to communicate sustainability disclosure, before the accounting regulation imperative. The paper studies the sustainability disclosure behaviour of a global multinational Company, Eni, an Italian Integrated Oil & Gas Listed Company. The aim is to examine the relationship between the ‘self-regulation’ disclosure before the law and the forces within the company that drove that decision and the ex-post disclosure after the regulation imperative. The analysis is conducted over the 2018–2011 period and considers all the annual reports (i.e., financial report and social, environmental or sustainability reports). The results state that ‘self-regulation’ is guided by strategic legitimacy based on factors as corporate strategy, corporate identity and stakeholders' pressure while the accounting regulation represents a tool to summarize non-financial data.