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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]

International organisations such as the EU, the OECD and the WBG have recommended that governments provide information to citizens about the sustainability of their public policies. Furthermore, previous studies have concluded that while stakeholders are demanding greater transparency from public entities about the sustainability of their actions, little research has been conducted into governmental information disclosure concerning sustainability. Accordingly, the aim of the present paper is to contribute to our understanding of sustainability practices and information transparency in this respect in governmental institutions, and thus enable improvements to be made in this field. In the view that e-government, based on information and communication technologies, is a key element in good governance aimed at achieving sustainable development, we identify factors that may promote the disclosure of information on the sustainability of public entities, by analysing the information content of regional governments' websites and its relationship with certain variables. Our main findings are that socio-economic factors such as education, population density and access to internet, and e-government factors such as the provision of public information online, the percentage of procedures completed after online start, the level of online services provided and broadband availability, are all relevant to the disclosure of sustainability information by regional governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gulf Cooperation Council countries are seeking to develop their governmental financial information systems to make them more informative and transparent. The aim of this article is to determine the extent to which Qatar has developed its governmental financial information systems in response to the enormous degree of economic and administrative development in recent decades, and to identify the most important factors that have influenced the reforms made in this area. For this purpose, Lüder's Financial Management Reform Process Model (2001) was referred to and semi-structured interviews were carried out with governmental accounting officials in Qatar in June 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]