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<p>Corporate greenwashing has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges in sustainability reporting, undermining trust in environmental communication and weakening the effectiveness of market and regulatory mechanisms. While scholarship has advanced conceptual debates on misleading environmental practices, the field has lacked a validated, multidimensional instrument capable of capturing the complexity of greenwashing across organisational contexts. This study addresses that gap by developing and empirically validating a novel measurement scale encompassing four interrelated dimensions: Misleading Environmental Claims (MEC), Strategic Disclosure Practices (SDP), ESG Metric Manipulation (EMM), and Green Trust (GT). Following best-practice protocols in scale development, we conducted item generation, expert validation, and large-scale survey testing, applying confirmatory factor analysis to establish reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. Results confirm a stable four-factor structure that not only advances conceptual clarity but also demonstrates predictive validity by linking perceptions of greenwashing to stakeholder evaluations of corporate reputation, transparency, and investment propensity. We further demonstrate real-world performance differentials between high- and low-greenwashing firms by embedding the validated constructs within the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) framework. By offering a rigorously validated instrument to systematically and comparably measure greenwashing, this study contributes both theoretically, by integrating insights from signalling theory, institutional legitimacy, and stakeholder trust, and practically, by equipping regulators, investors, and practitioners with a diagnostic tool to identify and mitigate misleading environmental communication. By doing so, this research lays a foundation for future inquiries into the antecedents, outcomes, and governance of greenwashing and responds to the urgent calls for accountability in the sustainability discourse.</p>

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Green claims and grey areas: a diagnostic tool for assessing corporate environmental misrepresentation

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月4日

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  • Augustine Okeke

摘要

Corporate greenwashing has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges in sustainability reporting, undermining trust in environmental communication and weakening the effectiveness of market and regulatory mechanisms. While scholarship has advanced conceptual debates on misleading environmental practices, the field has lacked a validated, multidimensional instrument capable of capturing the complexity of greenwashing across organisational contexts. This study addresses that gap by developing and empirically validating a novel measurement scale encompassing four interrelated dimensions: Misleading Environmental Claims (MEC), Strategic Disclosure Practices (SDP), ESG Metric Manipulation (EMM), and Green Trust (GT). Following best-practice protocols in scale development, we conducted item generation, expert validation, and large-scale survey testing, applying confirmatory factor analysis to establish reliability, convergent and discriminant validity. Results confirm a stable four-factor structure that not only advances conceptual clarity but also demonstrates predictive validity by linking perceptions of greenwashing to stakeholder evaluations of corporate reputation, transparency, and investment propensity. We further demonstrate real-world performance differentials between high- and low-greenwashing firms by embedding the validated constructs within the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) framework. By offering a rigorously validated instrument to systematically and comparably measure greenwashing, this study contributes both theoretically, by integrating insights from signalling theory, institutional legitimacy, and stakeholder trust, and practically, by equipping regulators, investors, and practitioners with a diagnostic tool to identify and mitigate misleading environmental communication. By doing so, this research lays a foundation for future inquiries into the antecedents, outcomes, and governance of greenwashing and responds to the urgent calls for accountability in the sustainability discourse.