Environmental disclosure and stakeholder engagement via social media: state of the art and potential in public utilities

The concept of sustainable development has become dominant in the current socio-economic debate at the global level. In particular, environmental issues have become increasingly central in the action of all organisations: private, public and hybrid. Analysing a sample of Italian public utilities, we studied the level of disclosure regarding environmental topics via public Facebook pages. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of Web 2.0 on municipally owned public utilities’ voluntary disclosure of environmental issues and stakeholder interest in this field. The findings show that the use of Facebook by public utilities to disclose environmental issues is still at an early stage. However, it is constantly growing, especially in the larger companies and in those with mixed public/private ownership.