Corporate Greenwashing in the ESG Era: Sustainability Claims, Regulatory Challenges, and Investor Risk

The rapid expansion of environmental, social and governance investing has been accompanied by a parallel rise in corporate greenwashing, the practice of overstating, selectively disclosing, or fabricating environmental credentials to secure reputational, regulatory, or financial advantage. This review synthesises the multidisciplinary literature on greenwashing published across finance, accounting, management, marketing, and environmental law to provide an integrated account of its definitions, drivers, detection methods, regulatory treatment, and consequences for investors. The review traces the evolution of greenwashing typologies from early legitimacy-based accounts to contemporary measurement frameworks built on the gap between disclosed and actual environmental performance, and it examines how divergence among environmental, social and governance rating agencies compounds the difficulty of distinguishing genuine sustainability leaders from symbolic compliers. It then evaluates the regulatory landscape, contrasting the European Union's mandatory disclosure architecture with the more contested and currently unsettled position in the United States, before assessing evidence linking greenwashing to investor risk through channels including cost of capital, ownership structure, and litigation exposure. Sector-specific evidence from executive compensation design is reviewed alongside emerging computational methods for detecting inconsistencies between corporate rhetoric and verifiable environmental outcomes. The review closes by identifying priority directions for future research, drawing conclusions for practitioners and policymakers, and outlining the limitations inherent in a narrative synthesis of a fast-moving and methodologically heterogeneous field.