Beyond Compliance: Voluntary Sustainability Reporting among Belgian Companies Excluded from the Revised CSRD Scope

Details

Supervisors

Roszkowska-Menkes, Maria

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enThis master’s thesis examines what drives voluntary sustainability reporting among Belgian companies excluded from the revised scope of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The narrowing of mandatory coverage creates a distinctive setting in which sustainability reporting is no longer driven by a direct legal obligation, making it possible to examine which company characteristics remain associated with the decision to report voluntarily. The study adopts a quantitative explanatory approach combining company-level data from Orbis with a structured review of official corporate sustainability publications covering recent reporting periods. Voluntary reporting is treated as a binary publication decision, and logistic regression is used to examine the association between reporting and three pre-specified company characteristics: company size, profitability and membership in a high-climate-impact sector. The findings show that voluntary sustainability reporting remains relatively uncommon among companies outside the revised mandatory scope. Company size emerges as the only statistically significant determinant among the characteristics examined, with larger companies being more likely to report voluntarily. By contrast, neither profitability nor membership in a high-climate-impact sector shows a statistically significant association with reporting. Overall, the results suggest that voluntary sustainability reporting remains observable among companies outside the revised mandatory scope, but that this behaviour is unevenly distributed across companies. Organisational scale appears particularly important, potentially reflecting differences in reporting capacity, stakeholder reach and organisational visibility. The study therefore provides early empirical evidence on corporate reporting behaviour under the revised CSRD framework and contributes to understanding what sustains sustainability disclosure when direct mandatory pressure is absent.