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Purpose: This paper aims to study companies' strategic responses to regulative institutional pressures on sustainability reporting. Particularly, it investigates the role of multiple stakeholder demands in shaping corporate responses to Law 11/2018 that transposes the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive in Spain. Design/methodology/approach: Informed by Oliver's framework, the study analyzes the 2018 non-financial information of Spanish listed companies mandated to report under Law 11/2018 to explore the relationship between adopting a particular strategic response and companies' stakeholder configuration. Findings: Companies facing multiple stakeholder pressures tend to use a compromise strategy favoring the disclosure of relevant topics to a specific stakeholder type. Specifically, environmentalists are the most influential stakeholder in determining the coverage of sustainability topics to the detriment of other stakeholders when companies suffer from regulatory pressures. Research limitations/implications: The study contributes to disentangling the factors determining how companies respond to sustainability reporting regulation. Future research could perform longitudinal and large multinational analyses to study the evolutionary process of corporate responses. Practical implications: The study is relevant to managers and policymakers as it highlights that sustainability reporting regulation should promote the coverage of relevant topics to less influential stakeholders. Social implications: The study explores the extent to which current sustainability reporting regulation can increase transparency on sustainability issues for all stakeholders. Originality/value: In contrast to previous literature exploring the extent to which firms comply with regulation, the study considers that companies can respond more actively to mandatory sustainability reporting requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the European Union is promoting the circular economy, a change that involves moving the foundations of actual economies toward the most sustainable production and consumption periods, in which the reuse of resources predominates, mainly through recycling, reuse, and reduction, among other strategies. This study, through the application of institutional theory, analyzes the role that institutional pressure has in the diffusion and adoption of the circular economy from the state to the regions inside through coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures. A matrix of institutional positioning was developed that analyzes the number and diversity of circular economy initiatives. The results show that coercive pressure followed by mimetic pressure are the most relevant in explaining the development of the circular economy in Spain in relation to the closest other European countries in Southern Europe, while there is low normative pressure. The results obtained provide relevant information on how to accelerate the development of the circular economy throughout the European Union through the adequate exercise of different types of institutional pressure.