Deconstructing corporate environmental, social, and governance performance: Heterogeneous stakeholder preferences in the food industry

Abstract

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance assessment has emerged as a way to analyze corporate sustainability. However, the literature suggests that stakeholders are not satisfied with advisory firms' current assessment approaches since they do not consider stakeholders' sustainability preferences. Adopting the stakeholder perspective, this study proposes a new approach to assess ESG performance by developing a stakeholder-specific composite indicator that considers different stakeholder profiles. The proposed approach is empirically implemented to assess the ESG performance of European food firms, as the food industry plays an essential role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The results provide evidence of differences in individual stakeholders' preferences regarding ESG assessment, even within the same stakeholder group (e.g., investors, consumers, or non-governmental organizations). However, the results reveal that almost all the stakeholders sampled showed individual firm rankings similar to generic rankings provided by advisory firms. In any case, this evidence suggests the need to reconsider how ESG composite indicators are constructed, underlining the value of enhanced transparency and communication with stakeholders to provide more valuable and reliable composite indicators.