Show Me Your Circle! A Typology of Circular Economy Disclosure Strategies by Multinationals

The circular economy (CE) is featuring more prominently in emerging regulations, codes of best practice, and corporate policies. Yet, accounting research offers limited insight into how circularity is currently conceptualized and communicated in corporate reports. Consequently, this paper contributes to emergent CE accounting debates by developing and applying a framework assessing the content, mode, and integration of CE disclosures. The framework is applied to a longitudinal thematic content analysis of sustainability reports issued by 31 multinationals independently identified as CE champions. Doing so reveals substantial variation in CE reporting practices ranging from the provision of policy-focused and generic detail to more performative and substantive reporting. Along this continuum are four CE reporting strategies: substantive implementation, targeted implementation, policy-focused disclosure, and curtailed application. These findings add to the limited prior work on how CE is reported to investors and other stakeholders. They offer empirical insight into how new sustainability concepts are translated into corporate reporting practice with implications for standard-setters and policymakers. The proposed framework will be a useful tool for investors, non-government organizations and other stakeholders interested in evaluating the reporting on CE. It can also be readily modified to deal with other emerging forms of sustainability-related reporting.