Global Stakeholders and Climate Transparency: Exploring National Governance in ASEAN-5

Abstract

Since climate change has emerged as one of the world's most urgent issues, businesses are under more pressure to make their environmentally friendly operations more transparent. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of foreign ownership on climate change disclosure and the role of national governance as a moderating variable. The study was conducted on banking companies in ASEAN-5 countries, namely 305 bank year observations during 2018–2022. Under the legitimacy theory framework, this study found that foreign ownership has a negative effect on climate change disclosure. The study also found that the voice of accountability, governance effectiveness, and regulatory quality weaken the negative effect of foreign ownership on climate change disclosure. The findings recommend that increasing public engagement, regulatory quality, and implementation are more impactful on corporate climate change disclosure than merely maintaining political stability and corruption control. These findings highlight the important role of strong national governance in promoting corporate disclosure and discouraging unethical practices related to environmental disclosure. These findings have been confirmed through robustness tests, such as the monotonic test and heckman two-stage.