Few developments in corporate citizenship have attracted as much hope in advance of their launch as the Global Reporting Initiative, to be formally inaugurated early next year.

The initiative will seek to create a common framework for assessing businesses' economic, environmental and social performance, collectively termed sustainability reporting. Its goals are ambitious - the GRI seeks to make sustainability reporting "as routine and credible as financial reporting in terms of comparability, rigour and verifiability".

Plans for the GRI's launch have been progressing in the US since 1997, led by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies and the United Nations Environment Programme. Next year's inauguration is attracting high expectations because of the strong coalition of interests that has built up around the project.

Development work on a common framework for sustainability reporting has been undertaken by a worldwide group of businesses, investment and accountancy organisations, NGOs and trade unions with more than 100 leading companies testing the GRI’s proposed guidelines.

Some organisations on the initiative's steering committee are not uncritical allies of global business. They are backing it in the belief the GRI may bring much-needed clarity to a core area of corporate social responsibility. A considerable number of companies already report on social and environmental performance.

But lack of an agreed framework allows them widespread latitude in determining how to do so, making evaluation and comparisons difficult.

It is envisaged that information generated by the initiative will be of use to a variety of interests. The GRI's promoters expect these to include institutional investors who need environmental information to assess risk, activists trying to influence managements, government officials choosing corporate partners and senior executives seeking to improve their businesses' levels of innovation or efficiency.

"I use the language of sustainability," says Allen White, the GRI’s director. "People from other backgrounds are more likely to speak of a business's intangible assets. But it leads to the same point.

"There is a great deal about the performance and prospects of businesses in today's economy that financial reporting alone cannot disclose, but which can be opened up by an integrated approach to economic, environmental and social performance."

The GRI will augment the United Nations Global Compact, launched in July 2000, and now endorsed by several hundred companies worldwide. Supporters of the Global Compact undertake to uphold nine basic principles relating to human and employment rights and environmental protection.

The GRI will provide companies with a basis for demonstrating their actual performance in relation to the compact's nine principles.

One of the big areas of division between the corporate sector and NGOs concerns the extent to which multinational companies’ global activities should be subject to legal regulation. Barry Coates, director of the World Development Movement, which campaigns against the causes of poverty in developing countries, complains about a lack of formal regulation and enforcement of international standards.

"It is a misconception that voluntary action can ever be sufficient," he says. In some cases, says Mr Coates, corporate social responsibility was "good business" in such respects as enhancing a company's reputation. But in instances where reputational risk did not warrant companies spending money on behaving ethically there was a need for "governments to set the boundaries around the market".

The Global Reporting Initiative sustainability reporting guidelines:
Economic: includes wages and benefits, productivity, outsourcing, research and development and training. The term economic "includes but is not limited to financial information".

Environmental: includes impacts on air, water, land, biodiversity and human health. Social: includes workplace health and safety, employee retention, labour rights, human rights and wages and conditions at outsourced operations.