Green promises and unverifiable claims: detecting corporate greenwashing in Indonesian sustainability reports through corpus linguistics and natural language processing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67490/ijle.v1i2.904Keywords:
corporate greenwashing, corpus linguistics, documentary verifiability, multimodal legitimation, natural language processingAbstract
Background: Corporate sustainability reports increasingly combine ambitious environmental commitments with uneven evidence, creating difficulties in distinguishing accountable disclosure from potentially misleading green claims. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian corporations construct environmental responsibility and whether linguistic promises, documentary specification, and visual legitimation remain mutually aligned. Method: A comparative corpus-assisted design integrates rule-based natural language processing, claim-verifiability assessment, and multimodal coding across six official sustainability reports, thirty-six contextual passages, and six report covers from three corporations during 2023–2024. Results: Promissory language dominated the textual corpus, whereas quantified performance statements occurred less frequently and future-oriented markers extended across most coded passages. Documentary analysis classified most units as having low verifiability, with time boundaries appearing more often than baselines, operational scopes, or assurance references. Implication: Cover analysis revealed recurrent combinations of nature imagery, community actors, green colour salience, and corporate logos, producing strong visual narratives of ecological and social responsibility. Novelty: This study introduces an integrated diagnostic framework that conceptualises greenwashing risk as misalignment among linguistic projection, evidential completeness, and multimodal legitimacy rather than as a property of isolated positive words, numerical claims, or environmental images and enables transparent comparison across companies, reporting years, claim types, evidential attributes, and visual strategies while preserving cautious interpretive boundaries in corporate reporting.
References
[1] V. Lagasio, “ESG-washing detection in corporate sustainability reports,” International Review of Financial Analysis, Art. no. 103742, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.irfa.2024.103742.
[2] N. Gorovaia and M. Makrominas, “Identifying greenwashing in corporate-social responsibility reports using natural-language processing,” European Financial Management, vol. 31, pp. 427–462, 2025, doi: 10.1111/eufm.12509.
[3] T. Li, X. Shu, and G. Liao, “Does corporate greenwashing affect investors’ decisions?,” Finance Research Letters, Art. no. 105877, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.frl.2024.105877.
[4] J. Keilmann and T. Koch, “When environmental claims are empty promises: How greenwashing affects corporate reputation and credibility,” Environmental Communication, vol. 18, pp. 266–284, 2024, doi: 10.1080/17524032.2023.2267782.
[5] F. Akhter, M. R. Hossain, H. Elrehail, S. U. Rehman, and B. Almansour, “Environmental disclosures and corporate attributes, from the lens of legitimacy theory: A longitudinal analysis on a developing country,” European Journal of Management and Business Economics, 2022, doi: 10.1108/EJMBE-01-2021-0008.
[6] Sneideriene and R. Legenzova, “Uncovering greenwashing: Investigating impression management gap in corporate reporting,” Sustainability, vol. 17, no. 18, Art. no. 8342, 2025, doi: 10.3390/su17188342.
[7] M. Gutierrez-Bustamante and L. Espinosa-Leal, “Natural language processing methods for scoring sustainability reports—A study of Nordic listed companies,” Sustainability, vol. 14, no. 15, Art. no. 9165, 2022, doi: 10.3390/su14159165.
[8] K. Ong, R. Mao, R. Satapathy, R. Shirota Filho, E. Cambria, J. Sulaeman, and G. Mengaldo, “Explainable natural language processing for corporate sustainability analysis,” Information Fusion, Art. no. 102726, 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.inffus.2024.102726.
[9] I. A. A. D. Santos, A. C. De Araújo Moxotó, and E. De Souza Mota, “Greenwashing in Brazilian corporations: A machine learning approach to unmask the discourse–practice gap,” Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 2025, doi: 10.1002/csr.70133.
[10] De Villiers, R. Dimes, and M. Molinari, “How will AI text generation and processing impact sustainability reporting? Critical analysis, a conceptual framework and avenues for future research,” Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, 2023, doi: 10.1108/SAMPJ-02-2023-0097.
[11] W. Moodaley and A. Telukdarie, “Greenwashing, sustainability reporting, and artificial intelligence: A systematic literature review,” Sustainability, vol. 15, no. 2, Art. no. 1481, 2023, doi: 10.3390/su15021481.
[12] W. Xu, M. Li, and S. Xu, “Unveiling the “veil” of information disclosure: Sustainability reporting “greenwashing” and “shared value.”,” PLOS ONE, vol. 18, Art. no. e0279904, 2023, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0279904.
[13] R. Zharfpeykan, “Representative account or greenwashing? Voluntary sustainability reports in Australia’s mining/metals and financial services industries,” Business Strategy and the Environment, 2021, doi: 10.1002/bse.2744.
[14] S. Ruiz-Blanco, S. Romero, and B. Fernandez-Feijoo, “Green, blue or black, but washing—What company characteristics determine greenwashing?,” Environment, Development and Sustainability, vol. 24, pp. 4024–4045, 2022, doi: 10.1007/s10668-021-01602-x.
[15] A. W. Montgomery, T. P. Lyon, and J. Barg, “No end in sight? A greenwash review and research agenda,” Organization & Environment, vol. 37, pp. 221–256, 2024, doi: 10.1177/10860266231168905.
[16] N. Kochkina, S. Macchia, and M. Floris, “Strategic language use in sustainability reporting: An empirical study,” Sustainability, vol. 16, no. 23, Art. no. 10229, 2024, doi: 10.3390/su162310229.
[17] L. K. Wedari, C. Jubb, and A. Moradi-Motlagh, “Corporate climate-related voluntary disclosures: Does potential greenwash exist among Australian high emitters’ reports?,” Business Strategy and the Environment, 2021, doi: 10.1002/bse.2836.
[18] S. De Silva Lokuwaduge and K. M. De Silva, “ESG risk disclosure and the risk of green washing,” Australasian Business, Accounting and Finance Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 2022, doi: 10.14453/aabfj.v16i1.10.
[19] F. Caputo, S. Pizzi, L. Ligorio, and R. Leopizzi, “Enhancing environmental information transparency through corporate social responsibility reporting regulation,” Business Strategy and the Environment, 2021, doi: 10.1002/bse.2814.
[20] M. Farooq, R. Zaman, D. Sarraj, and F. Khalid, “Examining the extent of and drivers for materiality assessment disclosures in sustainability reports,” Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, 2021, doi: 10.1108/SAMPJ-04-2020-0113.
[21] H. Kang and J. Kim, “Analyzing and visualizing text information in corporate sustainability reports using natural language processing methods,” Applied Sciences, vol. 12, no. 11, Art. no. 5614, 2022, doi: 10.3390/app12115614.
[22] A. Vinella, M. Capetz, R. Pattichis, C. Chance, and R. Ghosh, “Leveraging language models to detect greenwashing,” arXiv, 2023, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2311.01469.
[23] X. Wang, X. Gao, and M. Sun, “Construction and analysis of corporate greenwashing index: A deep learning approach,” EPJ Data Science, vol. 14, 2025, doi: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00562-w.
[24] A. Ahmad, S. Raza, and R., “Greenwashing in corporate climate disclosures: A machine learning-based detection approach,” Global Social Sciences Review, 2025, doi: 10.31703/gssr.2025(x-iii).10.
[25] A. Adams and S. Abhayawansa, “Connecting the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental, social and governance investing and calls for harmonisation of sustainability reporting,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting, vol. 82, Art. no. 102309, 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.cpa.2021.102309.
[26] M. Cerciello, F. Busato, and S. Taddeo, “The effect of sustainable business practices on profitability: Accounting for strategic disclosure,” Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 2022, doi: 10.1002/csr.2389.
[27] S. Ratti, M. Arena, G. Azzone, and L. Dell’Agostino, “Beyond corporate environmental disclosure: Tangible efforts or greenwashing? The case of Italian non-financial listed companies,” Sustainable Development, 2025, doi: 10.1002/sd.3544.
[28] Oppong-Tawiah and J. Webster, “Corporate sustainability communication as “fake news”: Firms’ greenwashing on Twitter,” Sustainability, vol. 15, no. 8, Art. no. 6683, 2023, doi: 10.3390/su15086683.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Arif Nugroho (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License