Greenwashing of Local Government: The Human-Caused Risks in the Process of Environmental Information Disclosure in China

Yanhong Tang,Yingwen Chen,Mengjin Du,Xin Miao,Rui Yang,Yichen Yang

doi:10.3390/su12166329

Abstract

The increasing occurrences of greenwashing pose great risks to environmental protection. The current studies mainly focused on corporate greenwashing, and few paid attention to the greenwashing of the local government (GLG), thus lacking methods to identify the risks of forming the GLG and finding practicable countermeasures. This paper tries to fill the research gap in the study of the GLG by analyzing human factors. Given that the GLG is in close relationship with environmental governance pressures related to environmental information disclosure (EID), this paper attempts to analyze the human-caused risks of forming the GLG in the process of EID. This work focused on the process analysis, examined the human causes that form the GLG in the stages of collecting, medium, and disseminating of environmental information (EI), and offered countermeasures embedded with resilience accordingly.

Highlights

With increasing demands for green products, green services, and sustainable development (e.g., [1]), more and more organizations are engaged in greenwashing in their environmental information (EI) reporting by exaggerating their commitment to environmental protection and misleading the public on the organizations’ environmental performance to gain the benefits from the expanding green market [2]
This paper focuses on process analysis and attempts to demonstrate the role of human causes in the process of environmental information disclosure (EID), that is, how to form and prevent the greenwashing of the local government (GLG)
This will help to find ways to reduce the human-caused risks of the GLG in the process of EID and put forward more targeted countermeasures for identifying and preventing the GLG

Summary

Introduction

With increasing demands for green products, green services, and sustainable development (e.g., [1]), more and more organizations are engaged in greenwashing in their environmental information (EI) reporting by exaggerating their commitment to environmental protection and misleading the public on the organizations’ environmental performance to gain the benefits from the expanding green market [2]. The current studies lacked a comprehensive analysis of the drivers of greenwashing, managers or decision-makers have few available methods to identify and prevent greenwashing. Delmas and Burbano [2] proposed a framework that included external, organizational, and individual drivers of greenwashing, the framework is used to identify and prevent corporate greenwashing. Research on the greenwashing of the local government (GLG) is still in its infancy, but the phenomenon of the GLG is very common and has no less harm than corporate greenwashing, It may induce the public to lose confidence in government environmental protection, resulting in negative social impact [11,12,13].

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Conclusion