Bioeconomy Through the Lens of Municipal Web Disclosure: Implications for Public Sector Management Accounting

Vollständiger Abstract

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ABSTRACT This research investigates the patterns of bioeconomy‐related disclosure on the websites of Canadian municipalities, viewed through the lenses of legitimacy, stakeholder, and institutional theories. Our sample consists of the 100 largest Canadian cities by population. Three patterns of municipalities' bioeconomy‐related disclosure emerged from our cluster analysis: limited bioeconomy disclosure, centered on biodiversity, and waste management and recycling; biodiversity‐driven disclosure, with particularly high biodiversity scores relative to the sample average, whereas other dimensions remain less well covered; and balanced extensive disclosure, thoroughly covering all the bioeconomy aspects coded. Significantly, no municipality explicitly frames its disclosure under the label “bioeconomy” (e.g., dedicated section, named strategy, and standardized terminology). Instead, bioeconomy appears as an implicit accountability issue, scattered throughout environmental and community‐related content. Greater harmonization and coordination are needed to improve bioeconomy‐related disclosure, transparency, awareness, and accountability at the municipal level. Conceptually, our research invites us to rethink municipal environmental web disclosure as a protobioeconomy reporting system. Drawing on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) public sector standards and bioeconomy literature, we build a bioeconomy‐related disclosure index that combines environmental and community dimensions. We then discuss how disclosure patterns can guide the design of monothematic bioeconomy reporting and the development of bioeconomy‐related performance indicators in public sector management accounting.