The language has changed, but greenwashing is still winning
By Professor Dato Dr Ahmad Ibrahim
A paper by Feghali, Najem, and Metcalfe performs an autopsy on the corpse of corporate sustainability. The authors have done the academic equivalent of lifting the hood on a car that claims to run on hope. What they find inside is largely the same combustion engine it has always been, now fitted with a sleek electric body kit. Their central finding, greenwashing is not a bug in the system. It is a feature.
We have spent two decades building an elaborate architecture of accountability. ESG ratings. Net-zero pledges. Chief Sustainability Officers with corner offices. The Global Reporting Initiative. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. We have created an entire priesthood of sustainability consultants, verification bodies, and standards-setters. And what Feghali, Najem, and Metcalfe demonstrate, through their systematic trawl of the literature, is that much of this apparatus has been captured, neutralized, or simply outrun.
The review identifies that greenwashing has evolved. It is no longer the cynical oil company running an advertisement about butterflies. That is amateur hour. The contemporary form is far more sophisticated. It is the financial institution that excludes coal from its lending policy but continues to finance the infrastructure that coal depends upon. It is the fast fashion brand that launches a “circular” collection made from recycled materials while its core business model remains predicated on producing 52 micro-seasons of disposable clothing per year. It is the carbon offset that allows a corporation to claim neutrality while its absolute emissions continue to rise.
The very metrics invented to measure sustainability are now being weaponized to obscure its absence. ESG ratings, the paper suggests, do not correlate strongly with actual environmental outcomes. They correlate with the ability to produce data. They reward disclosure, not performance. They measure the quality of the storytelling, not the health of the ecosystem. What emerges is a portrait of an entire economic sector—the sustainability assurance industry—that has become parasitic upon the crisis it claims to address. The consultants who advise companies on sustainability reporting are often the same firms that audit their financial statements. The rating agencies sell both the grades and the consulting services to improve them. The standards are negotiated behind closed doors with the very industries they purport to regulate.
The review identifies what might be called “the professionalization of dissent.” As sustainability has become a credentialed profession, with its journals, conferences, and career pathways, a peculiar thing has happened. The people who once stood outside the corporate gates demanding accountability now sit inside the building, managing the PowerPoint slides for the next board presentation. They are sincere. But they are structurally impotent. No amount of reporting frameworks can alter the fundamental logic of quarterly capitalism. No rating system can reconcile the extraction of finite resources with infinite growth. No communication strategy can make a business model that depends upon planned obsolescence compatible with planetary boundaries.
The paper claims we have treated greenwashing as a failure of communication—a gap between what companies say and what they do. The solution, therefore, has been better communication: more disclosure, more verification, more transparency. But what if the gap is not the problem? What if the gap is the strategy? What if the function of corporate sustainability communications is not to accurately represent corporate behavior but to create sufficient ambiguity that extraction can continue without provoking a legitimacy crisis? The review suggests that the very concept of “greenwashing” may be too narrow. It implies that if we could just align words with deeds, the problem would be solved. But the deeds themselves are the problem.
If greenwashing is structural rather than episodic, if it is embedded in the incentive architecture of contemporary capitalism, then the interventions must be structural as well. What would that look like? Not more voluntary frameworks. Not another round of “stakeholder engagement.” Not the next iteration of the Global Reporting Initiative. These things have their place, but they are rearranging deck chairs on a vessel that is taking on water faster than it can be bailed.
We have been asking the wrong question. We have been asking how to make corporations tell the truth about their sustainability performance. The question should be why we have outsourced the stewardship of the planetary commons to institutions whose fiduciary duty compels them to externalize costs. The authors have synthesized two decades of scholarship. They have shown us the machine from every angle, documented its components, traced its supply chains, interviewed its operators. What they have produced is not just a literature review. It is an indictment. The question now is whether we have the courage to read it as one.
The author is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at ahmadibrahim@ucsiuniversity.edu.my.