Call for paper: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Management, reporting, and assurance to address social and environmental challenges

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Management, reporting, and assurance to address social and environmental challenges

The United Nations established the SDGs in 2015. These represent 17 global goals and 169 associated targets (UN, 2015). Organisations are impacted by these goals, and they have responded through their management, reporting and assurance processes (Lodhia, 2025, Lodhia et al, 2023 2025, Kaur et al, 2025) to address systemic societal and environmental challenges (Dimes et al, 2025, Grana et al, 2025). However, existing research has touched the surface only and there is scope for exploring the management, reporting and assurance of the SDGs in greater depth (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018, 2020), given that more than a decade has elapsed since these goals were formulated. This Special Issue is an opportunity to bring together research that addresses how organisations have responded to the SDGs since their inception.

SDGs impact most organisations, including corporations (Lodhia et al, 2023), the public sector (Kaur et al, 2025, Lodhia et al, 2025), and other institutions such as NGOs, B-Corps, charities, social enterprises, universities and hybrid organisations (Lodhia, 2025). An understanding of SDGs management, reporting and assurance overall in specific sectors or across the sectors is lacking.

There is also a need to explore specific SDGs, as each of the 17 goals aims to address a distinct social, environmental or economic issue affecting global communities. Moreover, the SDGs are inherently interconnected, whereby progress in one area can generate cascading effects, either beneficial or adverse on others (Nilsson et al, 2018). Despite this complexity, the interrelationships among the goals remain largely underexplored in current research and practice. Hence, it becomes worth exploring how organisations address specific goals and whether a tradeoff is involved in addressing the goals.

List of Topic Areas

Potential issues to consider in this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

The management of SDGs by organisations, the organizational and behavioral processes involved, and the measurement of SDGs.
The disclosure of SDGs, the motivations for such disclosures and the links with internal processes.
The assurance for SDGs and the role of auditors in this process.
The role of stakeholders in management, reporting and assurance of SDGs, stakeholder perceptions of corporate SDGs practices, and stakeholder engagement processes.
The role of modern technologies (such a blockchain and artificial intelligence) in SDGs management, disclosure and assurance.
The use of social media for corporate information dissemination on SDGs.
The impact of the Covid pandemic on SDGs management, reporting and assurance.
The impact of regulatory requirements on the management, disclosure and assurance of SDGs.
Partnerships between organisations for the management, reporting and assurance of SDGs.
Rainbow washing of SDGs management, disclosure and assurance.

Guest Editors

Sumit Lodhia (Adelaide University, Adelaide, Australia)

Amanpreet Kaur (Adelaide University, Adelaide, Australia)

Nathalie Crutzen (HEC Liège, ULiège, Liège, Belgium)

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

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Author Guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.