Sustainability Reporting Practices in Developing Countries: A Critical Narrative Review of Determinants, Regulation, Credibility and Global Standardisation

Sustainability reporting has spread rapidly beyond the industrialised economies in which it originated, and securities regulators, central banks and stock exchanges across Asia, Africa and Latin America now require or encourage companies to disclose environmental, social and governance information. The expansion of practice has not been matched by an equally clear understanding of what such reporting achieves in developing countries, where state–business relations, ownership concentration, informal institutions, enforcement capacity and exposure to global value chains differ markedly from the settings in which dominant theories were formulated. This critical narrative review examines corporate sustainability reporting practices in developing and emerging economies, with the aim of evaluating the strength and consistency of evidence on why companies report, how regulation alters reporting, how credible the resulting disclosures are, and how the arrival of global baseline standards may reshape local accountability. Peer-reviewed literature and authoritative institutional documents were identified through multidisciplinary scholarly indexes, citation tracking and official regulatory sources, and were appraised for design, contextual sensitivity and analytical robustness. The synthesis indicates that firm size, industry sensitivity, foreign ownership and export exposure are the most consistently supported correlates of reporting, whereas findings on board characteristics and profitability are inconsistent and heavily dependent on measurement choices. Qualitative evidence repeatedly shows that powerful transnational audiences, rather than local communities, shape disclosure agendas, and that silence on labour, human rights and environmental harm persists alongside growth in reporting volume. Quasi-experimental studies of disclosure mandates, principally from China and India, show measurable capital-market and behavioural effects, but these findings coexist with evidence of symbolic compliance, declining voluntary assurance and politically motivated disclosure. Investor-oriented global standards may improve comparability while narrowing the range of impacts that developing-country stakeholders regard as material. Major unresolved questions concern the real-world outcomes of reporting, the credibility of assurance, the position of small and state-owned enterprises, and the local consequences of standard harmonisation. The evidence supports a cautious conclusion: sustainability reporting in developing countries is institutionally embedded and politically mediated, and disclosure growth should not be interpreted as evidence of improved accountability without independent verification of corporate conduct.