**4.1 Corporate social responsibility in the social report and participatory budgeting processes**

One of the significant and common aspects in the international diffusion of the Social Report model is that it is a voluntary act and that there are no rules for its production, as well as a single commonly accepted model. It is therefore a voluntary pro-active assumption of responsibility in the strategic planning phase, with ethical objectives and also environmental responsibility of all the stakeholders involved, which relate social performance to environmental performance. It is possible to identify the early 2000s [67–70], as a turning point for the process of disseminating the social report, which in recent years is becoming increasingly important, even if in Italy one of the major limits to the diffusion of the themes of sustainability and of the social report is believed to be represented by the difficulty of determining a relationship between the investments made in this field and the relative economic return [71–74].

If, from a financial point of view, impact investing projects can generate less financial profit than other types of private investment, it is nevertheless important *The Ethical and Responsibility Components in Environmental Challenges… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94341*

to underline how these projects can generate for the financiers an intangible component of value, linked to the possible satisfaction resulting from the ethics of the initiatives and the recognition and social appreciation by the community, often with a decrease in the levels of potential conflict between the investor and other interest groups involved.

Furthermore, the issue of transparency and shared accountability are also addressed in the participatory budgeting processes, which flow into the deliberative and participatory budget models [75–76]. The distinction between the two areas, made by Ravazzi and Pomatto [77] is to be highlighted: 1) participatory processes are aimed in particular at activating citizens in the public sphere, so that they can put pressure on public administrators, inducing them to take care of themselves their needs; 2) deliberative processes have a partially different objective, namely to create open and in-depth discussion venues between citizens who have different or opposing ideas, points of view and interests, in order to develop solutions in a constructive way. The theory of deliberative democracy is undoubtedly partly linked to that of participatory democracy, but has progressively distinguished itself by a greater orientation towards consensus building and the resolution of conflicts in public policies.

On this last aspect, the question of proactivity and "responsible" awareness of both the entrepreneur and the stakeholders involved in investing in processes from their start-up phase can be identified. Environmental issues also test these issues.
