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Although the transparency and sustainability of governments are currently of great interest to researchers, few studies have specifically addressed these issues. Nevertheless, previous research has found sustainability transparency as a key issue in government–citizen relations, especially for local governments (LGs). The aim of this article is to identify factors that promote online transparency regarding the sustainability of public policies, by means of an empirical study of 62 LGs in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Southern Europe. Our results show that the prevailing administrative tradition may influence the degree of transparency of LGs, with population, socioeconomic, and financial factors being relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current crisis, citizens are demanding greater public sector transparency and accountability. In this paper, we advance the understanding of sustainability practices in public administration. We propose to compare the dissemination of sustainability of various regional governments, analyzing the websites of these regional governments through a content analysis, using for this purpose a list of items obtained from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. Our results show that Spanish regional governments, spread two-thirds of the information in the GRI guidelines, being the social information which presents a higher level of response and corresponding general aspects which has a lower level of dissemination. In addition, those regional governments with greater environmental commitment are those who publish more information about sustainability. From our conclusions, we emphasize that the poor financial situation of the Spanish regional governments does not seem to promote them to disseminate information about sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although international organizations and prior literature have recognized the importance of sustainability reporting for governments nowadays, some studies have revealed that this is an issue that has received little attention and thus needs further investigation. This article studies the publication of information on sustainability issues by local governments, analysing the relationship between diverse levels of sustainability information disclosure and some socioeconomic, financial and population variables. Based on the increased use of the Internet by governments, the methodology applied in this study is to analyse the websites of 55 major towns and cities in Spain, seeking 61 items that are recommended in the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines. By applying multiple linear regression analysis, we analysed the influence of 13 factors on the sustainability reporting provided by these municipal authorities. The results show that social information is the most widespread, and that the dependent population has a positive impact on the sustainability disclosures. The major opportunities to improve sustainability practices lie in improving the disclosure of economic and environmental information, through the publication of formal sustainability reports and the enhanced coordination of information published individually by different departments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]