ESG Under Pressure: Key Challenges in Practice

This review examines the practical challenges that continue to shape and constrain the implementation of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks across contemporary organizations and markets. Although ESG has gained global prominence as a pillar of sustainable and responsible business conduct, its translation into practice remains uneven and fraught with systemic obstacles. The analysis synthesizes current theoretical and empirical insights to identify five major domains of difficulty: regulatory fragmentation, organizational misalignment, market driven pressures and financialization, cultural and educational limitations, and persistent data and transparency gaps. These challenges reveal that the core barriers to ESG adoption are not conceptual, but infrastructural and operational, arising from the misfit between aspirational sustainability norms and the institutional environments in which firms operate. By integrating these dimensions, the review highlights how ESG operates “under pressure,” caught between ethical expectations and practical constraints. The paper concludes by emphasizing that addressing these pressures requires coordinated regulatory reform, internal organizational transformation, enhanced awareness and capability building, and the development of more reliable information systems to support credible and impactful ESG practice.

کلیدواژه ها:

ESG ، sustainability ، non financial disclosure ، market pressures ، data transparency