Corporate uptake of the Sustainable Development Goals: Mere greenwashing or an advent of institutional change?

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