Greening Emerging Economies: Enhancing Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance through Environmental Management Accounting and Green Financing

Tianyao Zhen and Md. Mominur Rahman ()
Additional contact information
Tianyao Zhen: College of Business, Gachon University, Seongnam-si 13120, Republic of Korea

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 11, 1-23

Abstract: Given the rising interest in sustainability globally, this paper investigates whether the environmental management accounting (EMA) and green financing of a firm are associated with superior environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, considering manufacturing firms from emerging economies like Bangladesh to address a gap in relevant research. Drawing on the perspective of contingency theory, this study is one of the first to analyze how EMA and green financing enable sustainable production to enhance ESG performance, as well as the mediation that sustainable production exerts on this relationship. This study entails an analysis of ESG performance in sensitive industries, i.e., those that are more likely to cause social and environmental damage. To test our hypotheses, we applied partial least squares path modeling to analyze data from 467 responses. Further, we used fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to check the robustness. The results suggest that sensitive industries present superior ESG performance through integrating EMA and green financing. Further, empirical evidence demonstrates that sustainable production fully mediates the relationship between EMA and ESG performance. Meanwhile, sustainable production does not moderate green financing and ESG performance. For managers, this study demonstrates how embedding green financing and EMA into the organizational process for transitioning to a sustainable production model can present superior ESG performance. Our study contributes to research on both the impact of EMA and green financing on ESG performance, mediation effects of sustainable production, and integrated analysis using PLS-SEM and fsQCA, and the practice of sustainability management in firms in developing countries.

Keywords: ESG performance; sustainable production; environmental management accounting; green financing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/11/4753/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/11/4753/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:11:p:4753-:d:1407794

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().