Corporate Uptake of the Sustainable Development Goals: Mere Greenwashing or an Advent of Institutional Change?

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly used by corporations for benchmarking and communicating their sustainability performance. The SDGs have several features that make them attractive for this purpose, including their universality, specificity and, in many cases, direct linkage with corporate outcomes. Corporations typically disclose their engagement strategies and outcomes voluntarily without the aid of standardized and externally verified reports. This creates a risk of corporations misusing the SDGs for “greenwashing” and “impact washing” their activities, for example through selective reporting of favorable information. Inaccurate and non-transparent disclosure can also introduce information asymmetries that distort decision making by investors and other stakeholders. Increasing institutional change towards new measurement frameworks (such as GRI and SASB standards) and regulatory oversight to monitor disclosure (e.g. the EU’s Non-Financial Reporting Directive) is likely to improve transparency and reliability in sustainability reporting. This study critically examines the prospects of institutional changes that facilitate the integration, measurement and reporting of corporate sustainability in general and the SDGs in particular. It also explores emerging innovations in corporate governance and regulation that seek to improve the integration of sustainability issues in corporations and financial markets.