Local Governments’ environmental disclosure via social networks: Organizational legitimacy and stakeholders’ interactions

In recent years, the use of social media has considerably increased interaction between the public sector and citizens. At the same time, environmental issues such as climate change are increasingly gaining importance in society. In such a scenario, local governments are called to engage and communicate with citizens on environmental issues and policies. This article explores whether and how local governments use the social platform Facebook with organizational legitimacy purposes and to interact with citizens on environmental sustainability. The paper contributes to understanding of how a social media platform could be regarded as a tool for disclosure of environmental information by local governments and the related organizational challenges. Starting from the list of all Italian municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, we analyse text data scraped from each local government's Facebook page over a six-year period (2012–2017). The study is twofold: firstly, it measures the municipalities' disclosure of environmental issues via Facebook, considering also some independent variables such as political orientation and geographical area; secondly, it evaluates citizens' reactions with local governments' environmental posts looking also at the organizational processes connected to the evolution of sustainability disclosure. Findings indicate an increasing general use of Facebook by local governments as a tool for sustainability disclosure despite a decrease in other sustainability reporting practices. During the same period, citizens' reaction with environmental posts grew faster than interest in general posts. Municipalities communicated more on environmental issues they perceived as relevant, although they did not align themselves with citizens' views. In fact, there seems to be a decoupling of interests. This study contributes to the literature on social platforms’ use by municipalities in the environmental disclosure system.