SUSTAINABILITY AND SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING IN SERBIA: ANALYSIS OF THE FOCUS GROUP RESULTS

Sustainable development of society cannot be achieved without responsible and sustainable business practices. Regarding the necessity of achieving the goals of sustainability derived from the Agenda 2030, Serbia, as a full-fledged member, is no exception. Therefore, companies in Serbia are obligated to follow the Agenda 2030 da as well as the sustainable development goals established in this document. However, much evidence shows that Serbia lags behind the European Union (EU) average in almost every indicator regarding these goals. Given the importance of sustainability and sustainable business practices as well as the numerous challenges related to these issues in Serbia, in order to get deeper insight into this area, the focus group, as a qualitative research method, was implemented. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyse the focus group results, upon which some recommendations for the policymakers in this country were made. The experts from the area of sustainability who took part in the focus group highlighted the crucial problems in the area of sustainability in Serbia, such as not paying sufficient attention to the impact on the environment of many companies, the avoidance of paying eco-taxes, missing adequate infrastructure for collecting the waste, the limited scope for reporting on sustainability, etc. The contribution of this paper is twofold: enriching domestic literature in the field of sustainability and providing recommendations to policymakers on how to improve the situation in Serbia regarding sustainability issues.