Sustainability reporting and public value: Evidence from port authorities

Abstract

Due to the growing importance of Port Authorities (PAs) in pursuing economic, social, and environmental goals, scholars and policymakers should understand how these PAs can contribute to creating public value. By adopting the strategic triangle framework of public value, we studied how Italian PAs create public value by investigating their non-financial disclosures. For this purpose, we performed a cluster analysis and a lexical correspondence analysis on the textual content of the sustainability reports of eight Italian PAs. The study results allowed us to understand how PAs preserve and disseminate public value, obtain legitimacy and support from stakeholders, and build operational capacity.