Local governments can have a prominent role in steering local level actions for sustainable development. To actively pursue sustainable development, local governments need to not only to generate sustainability performance information to target their actions and demonstrate their effects towards sustainability but integrate it as part of their managerial practices and consider sustainability performance information as part of their routine management and decision-making. Due to the complex and ambiguous nature of sustainability as well as institutional features of the local government organizations – and the contradictions and tensions between these two – the integration of sustainability performance information as part of managerial practices of local governments can be challenging. We interviewed 46 key individuals who had played active roles in the integration process of sustainability performance information into the management practices of 18 different local governments in Finland and used the interview records to explore why is it challenging to integrate sustainability performance information into managerial practices in local government. Through our data, we outline five common challenges in the integration of sustainability performance information as part of the managerial practice: (1) Ambiguity and multiplicity of sustainability performance, (2) Cultural barriers and politicization of performance, (3) Siloed organizational structure and practices, (4) Unclear role of sustainability performance information, and (5) Techical difficulties in performance measurement and management