Sustainable Corporate Governance: Problems and Contradictions of Implementation in Conditions of Instability

Corporate governance is regulated by civil (corporate) legislation, and the achievement of the SDGs and the implementation of the ESG agenda are ensured mainly by soft regulation: international (GRI) and national standards, focused mainly on the formalization of activities, the preparation of relevant reports, while real results are difficult to assess due to the lack of relevant data and techniques. Uncertainty hinders law formation, which cannot reveal the state of existing relations and law-making, which cannot rely on an adequate and objective analysis of the state of relations in the field of sustainable corporate governance in order to identify the need for their regulation. Traditional for the last decades use of foreign experience (reception, adaptation) is significantly hampered by the current escalation of international tension. The current soft norms and GRI Standards, which allow reporting on the implementation of the SDGs and ESG, are evaluative in nature, difficult to verify and do not provide for liability for their distortion. In the current conditions of the extreme complexity of the functioning of the economy, the priorities of «real», financial indicators inevitably push aside «abstract» indicators of the impact on the environment and society. In the aggregate, in the medium term, the legal model of corporate governance will continue to be based on the current and improved corporate legislation, while the achievement of the SDGs and ESG will remain in the soft regulation sector.

ESG, Global Reporting Initiative, sustainable development, corporate governance, ESG, social responsibility, environment, Global Reporting Initiative, governance standards