IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jenpmg/v64y2021i3p432-463.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sustainability materiality matrices in doubt: may prioritizations of aspects overestimate environmental performance?

Author

Listed:
  • Idoya Ferrero-Ferrero
  • Raúl León
  • María Jesús Muñoz-Torres

Abstract

This study builds on the research gap that arises from the consistency analysis of the GRI-materiality approach with other prioritization approaches. The main objective is to explore to what extent corporate environmental performance is consistent using two different prioritization approaches. This study employs a novel quantitative approach to assess environmental performance through the prioritization of environmental aspects by using companies’ materiality analysis and independent expert knowledge. The empirical analysis focuses on the environmental performance analysis of wearing apparel companies. The main findings reveal that companies with better environmental performance could be using materiality analysis to further embellish the positive performance or for greenwashing purposes. This study could serve as a starting point to improve understanding of how companies could identify, from an objective and comparable basis, those environmental aspects that are essential to their business strategy and that are necessary to help stakeholders to make fully informed decisions.

Suggested Citation

  • Idoya Ferrero-Ferrero & Raúl León & María Jesús Muñoz-Torres, 2021. "Sustainability materiality matrices in doubt: may prioritizations of aspects overestimate environmental performance?," Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 64(3), pages 432-463, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:64:y:2021:i:3:p:432-463
    DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2020.1766427
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09640568.2020.1766427
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09640568.2020.1766427?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jordan Famularo, 2023. "Corporate social responsibility communication in the ICT sector: digital issues, greenwashing, and materiality," International Journal of Corporate Social Responsibility, Springer, vol. 8(1), pages 1-25, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jenpmg:v:64:y:2021:i:3:p:432-463. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CJEP20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.