The Rise of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) as a Case of Institutional Entrepreneurship

Since its conception in 1999, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has rapidly become the leader among voluntary worldwide sustainability reporting systems. It emerged on the crest of the corporate social responsibility movement, and is a descendant of the social movements in the 1970s. GRI introduced three institutional innovations: a multistakeholder process for developing reporting guidelines; institutionalizing the process for producing successive generations of the guidelines; creating an organization to serve as the steward of the guidelines and of the process. The GRI champions have been remarkably successful, working under the conditions of limited resources, visibility and political power. We explain this success using the concept of ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ and by showcasing three types of tactics: discursive, material and charismatic. The framing of the GRI initiative—as a winwin solution for the shared problem of information management, and as an efficiency gain for all actors—was crucial to its success because it allowed balancing several sets of competing objectives: between the individual and collective interests; between broad consultation and efficient pursuit of technical objectives; between holding a vision of social change and setting attainable instrumental goals; and between building a new institution and not challenging the existing institutions and power relations. This balancing act imposed several crucial tradeoffs, and left a legacy of unresolved tensions within the nascent institution. The GRI story highlights the fundamental dilemma faced by institutional entrepreneurs who use inclusiveness and multistakeholder participation as fuel for affecting social change.