Recently, the European Commission has tightened its regulations regarding sustainability reporting as a result of the previous regulations being considered too weak and problematic. The new revised regulation is called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

The study aims to investigate the impact and consequences the CSRD directive will bring to municipal corporations and how this implementation of the directive may change the work situation for municipal corporations. Additionally, the study aims to enhance the understanding of how the directive can have an impact on the broader understanding of sustainability within municipal corporations. The public sector is of particular interest to study and investigate how they tackle the implementation of the new directive. This is due to there being limited research done in the public sector about sustainability reporting and that their purpose is to generate public value for the society.

The research in this thesis has been conducted through a qualitative and explorative case study, where one municipality has been studied. Thereby, the municipal corporations’ employees responsible for sustainability have participated in semi-structured interviews.

The qualitative exploratory case study approach was chosen to gain insights into an area where the effects are still unknown, about how the municipal employees experience thei mplementation process and their perceptions towards sustainability.

The findings were analyzed through a thematic analysis guided by the lens of institutional theory and theories on change of organization, work, and knowledge. The results show that the implementation of the CSRD directive leads to organizational change and challenges for municipal corporations and this in turn results in a changed work situation for the municipal employees in terms of workload, roles, and tasks.

Additionally, the study implies that the CSRD directive will have an impact on the overall understanding and knowledge of sustainability within municipal corporations, due to the directive requiring increased collaborations which affects knowledge development and exchange.

Sustainability can thereby potentially expand throughout the organizations.