Sustainable development: how power generating companies understand it

The topic of the article is understanding of sustainable development by large enterprises of the Russia’s power engineering complex. Sustainable development used to be considered in the frameworks of countries or regions, but in this article the authors consider it in the framework of companies. The goal of the article is to find out whether Russian power generating companies understand the concept of sustainable development in a way of its original meaning or have their own point of view. On the basis of reports on sustainable development (or corporate social responsibility reports), a comparative analysis of reporting was carried out; the companies’ understanding of sustainable development concept and their activities related to sustainability assurance are studied. The object of study is four Russian power generating companies: Gazprom, Rosneft, SUEK and RusHydro. Each of them specializes on particular branches of power industry and is considered to be a leader in its sphere. These are large Russian companies, which allows to be sure of their institutional influence and importance of their ideology on Russian business society, which is more important within the study topic. They are most likely to become role models of sustainable development in each branch of the industry. Based on the reports the authors concluded that the companies have quite clear understanding of sustainable development concept, and implemented projects and measures prove this statement. But for reporting they use international unified GRI model. Due to this fact, the opportunity to assess staff and executives’ individual understanding of the concept is lost, because the GRI form determines common rules about published information. Nevertheless, the executives are quite aware of valuableness and significance of the concept as a whole and its elements in particular.