The review, conducted by Sunitha Prabhuram and Thamburaj Anthuvan of Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Dubai, followed the PRISMA 2020 protocol for systematic literature reviews. The researchers searched Scopus, supplemented by Google Scholar cross-searching, using Boolean strings that combined terms such as ESG materiality, sustainability materiality, financial materiality, impact materiality, and double materiality with disclosure and reporting terms. After identification, deduplication, title and abstract screening, and full-text eligibility assessment, 48 studies remained. Of the 38 studies excluded at the full-text stage, 18 lacked substantive engagement with materiality despite discussing ESG reporting broadly, nine had insufficient linkage to materiality-related frameworks, and 11 offered limited analytical contribution. A second reviewer independently audited a 25 percent subsample of the corpus to check coding consistency, with discrepancies resolved through discussion.

At the heart of the analysis lies a conceptual fault line that most casual observers of the ESG boom never see. Materiality, in traditional financial reporting, refers to information significant enough to influence the economic decisions of investors and other capital providers. Financial materiality carries this logic into the sustainability domain: an environmental or social issue matters only insofar as it affects expected cash flows, asset values, or the cost of capital. Climate transition risks, regulatory exposure, litigation threats, and supply chain disruptions all qualify under this lens because they translate into financial consequences for the firm. This investor-centered logic underpins the standards of the International Sustainability Standards Board, which anchors disclosure to enterprise value.

Impact materiality takes the opposite starting point. Rooted in stakeholder theory and sustainability governance, it requires companies to account for their effects on the world regardless of whether those effects ever touch the bottom line. Pollution, biodiversity loss, poor working conditions, and community displacement can impose enormous social and environmental costs even when profitability remains untouched. The Global Reporting Initiative is the most prominent framework built on this foundation. Double materiality, meanwhile, merges the two perspectives: a sustainability issue is reportable if it either affects enterprise value or represents a significant corporate impact on society and the environment. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and its European Sustainability Reporting Standards, developed by the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group, institutionalize this hybrid approach, requiring firms to assess material issues across their entire value chain from both angles.

The review’s central finding is that these competing logics have not merged despite a striking convergence in reporting form. Frameworks now share standardized terminology, structured disclosure categories, and common expectations around governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics. The ISSB’s global baseline and the European standards have pushed standard-setters toward cross-framework mapping and interoperability efforts. Yet beneath this architectural alignment, the underlying assumptions about accountability remain irreconcilable. The ISSB regime serves capital providers and frames sustainability as an extension of financial reporting; the European regime serves a broader constituency of employees, regulators, civil society, and affected communities, and frames disclosure as an instrument of public accountability. Structural convergence, the authors argue, can coexist with endemic fragmentation.

The fragmentation extends into measurement practice. The reviewed literature reveals no standardized method for operationalizing materiality in empirical research or corporate reporting. Researchers rely on materiality matrices, formal double materiality assessments, disclosure indices, content analysis of sustainability reports, and narrative classification of ESG topics, each with different thresholds, coding conventions, units of analysis, and topic taxonomies. An issue deemed material in one study may be treated entirely differently in another, restricting cross-study comparability and hindering cumulative knowledge building. In corporate practice, firms operating across multiple regimes may use identical terminology while applying different assessment processes, stakeholder engagement procedures, and significance thresholds, meaning that materiality tests can be situation-specific rather than comparable across firms, industries, or jurisdictions.

The practical consequences ripple outward. For multinational companies, complying simultaneously with ISSB-style and European-style requirements means running parallel materiality assessments, documenting judgments under different logics, and preparing for assurance under divergent expectations. The review notes that newer European regimes have made materiality assessments more transparent, but most operational approaches still depend on individual firm interpretation, complicating assurance readiness and disclosure comparability. Investors and assurance providers, the authors suggest, need to consider the underlying materiality orientation of any sustainability report before comparing it across companies or jurisdictions, because two documents that look structurally similar may rest on fundamentally different judgments about whose interests the disclosure serves.

Why do these competing logics persist? The review points to deep institutional path dependence. Anglo-American reporting traditions have long emphasized investor protection and decision usefulness, while European systems have historically prioritized public accountability, a divergence now embodied in the contrast between the ISSB and the CSRD. Double materiality attempts to reconcile the two views, but the tension remains, and the literature is divided on whether financial and double materiality are complementary extensions of one another or genuinely competing disclosure philosophies. The authors also note that dynamic materiality, the idea that sustainability impacts may become financially material over time as externalities are internalized through regulation, litigation, or reputational pressure, appeared only indirectly in the reviewed studies, suggesting a promising theoretical frontier linking impact significance to financial significance.

Looking ahead, the review argues that a single global materiality standard is improbable. Instead, the authors predict a plural but synchronized future: growing structural coherence alongside persistent divergence in disclosure purpose. They reframe materiality itself, moving it from a technical reporting threshold to a multi-level disclosure-governance mechanism that connects institutional standard-setting, organizational reporting practice, and accountability orientation. The policy challenge, they contend, is not to force harmonization but to build interoperability, giving standard-setters, regulators, and firms clearer guidance on translating materiality considerations across the ISSB, ESRS, and GRI frameworks. Stronger internal governance for stakeholder engagement, assessment, documentation, and review would help companies navigate multi-regime compliance, while improved interoperability mechanisms could reduce compliance complexity and enhance the comparability and decision usefulness of disclosures worldwide.

The review also identifies a conspicuous blind spot: emerging economies. The corpus was dominated by empirical work shaped by European regulatory developments, and direct evidence on how firms in developing and transitional economies cope with conflicting disclosure obligations, limited institutional capacity, and assurance readiness remains scarce. The authors flag this absence as a priority for future research, alongside empirical studies of how firms implement simultaneous financial and impact assessments, the evolving role of assurance services across different materiality criteria, and the potential of interoperability models and double materiality approaches to function as translation systems between disclosure regimes. Until those gaps close, the global ESG reporting landscape will likely remain what this review says it already is: a two-track architecture in which the paperwork increasingly looks the same while the reasons for producing it continue to diverge.

Subject of Research: Competing ESG materiality regimes and their effects on global sustainability reporting harmonization

Article Title: Harmonization and fragmentation in competing ESG materiality regimes and their implications for sustainability reporting

Article References: Prabhuram, S., & Anthuvan, T. (2026). Harmonization and fragmentation in competing ESG materiality regimes and their implications for sustainability reporting. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00512-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00512-5

Keywords: ESG reporting, materiality, double materiality, financial materiality, sustainability disclosure, ISSB, CSRD, ESRS, GRI, regulatory fragmentation, interoperability, systematic review

The volume under review, published by Springer Nature in 2026, comprises fifteen chapters drawn primarily from researchers at Waseda University. Its central claim is ambitious: the transition to carbon neutrality is not merely a technological substitution problem but a cultural, ethical, and institutional transformation. That framing places the book squarely in conversation with a growing body of scholarship on climate justice, just transition, the political economy of climate change, and decarbonization in Asia, and the review explicitly evaluates the book’s claims against these established literatures and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

What makes the collection unusual is its breadth of intellectual terrain. Among the chapters catalogued in the review’s bibliography are analyses of intergenerational altruism and intergenerational equity as a source of the emissions gap; an account of new sustainability disclosure requirements for listed companies in Japan; a study of historical institutionalism as a way of explaining and overcoming barriers to urban carbon neutrality through transport-land use coordination; case studies of how policies affect traditional resource management in the Subak system of Bali, Indonesia; an assessment of green logistics and its effects on carbon neutrality; a case study in Cambodia on the impact of climate change on vulnerable families in Southeast Asia; and a philosophical reassessment of individual moral responsibility within collective climate harm. There is even a chapter on environmental and cultural history and the history of imagination, described through the striking imagery of dandelion and white chrysanthemum drops.

This range is precisely the point of the review’s most positive verdict. Ulum acknowledges the book’s original contribution to the culture-climate relationship, a dimension often treated as a soft afterthought in climate policy debates dominated by economic modeling and technology roadmaps. By insisting that cultural values, ethical commitments, and institutional arrangements shape what decarbonization is politically possible, the volume pushes back against the assumption that better technology alone will deliver net zero. The chapter on shared responsibility, for instance, engages a question that has long troubled moral philosophers: how to apportion individual responsibility for a harm, like climate change, that is produced collectively by billions of small contributions.

The chapter on intergenerational equity carries similar weight. Climate change is, at its core, an intergenerational transfer problem: present emitters enjoy the benefits of fossil energy while future generations absorb the climate damages. Framing the emissions gap as a question of intergenerational altruism connects formal economics to ethics, asking whether and how the welfare of people not yet born should be counted in today’s policy choices. That question sits behind every discount rate used in cost-benefit analyses of climate policy, and the fact that a social science volume makes it a central theme rather than a footnote is notable.

Other chapters ground these abstract concerns in concrete governance challenges. The analysis of sustainability disclosure requirements for Japanese listed companies addresses one of the fastest-moving arenas of climate regulation, in which corporations are increasingly required to report climate-related risks and transition plans. The historical institutionalism chapter explains why cities, despite their technical potential for carbon neutrality, remain locked into car-dependent, land-use patterns that resist change. And the Bali case study shows how top-down climate and conservation policies can collide with traditional resource management systems, a cautionary tale about decarbonization policies that ignore local institutions.

The volume is not without problems, and the review is unusually candid about them. The first is the narrow institutional and geographic scope of the author base. Because the contributors come primarily from a single university, the collection risks presenting a particular national and disciplinary perspective as if it were a general account of the transition to carbon neutrality. Reviews of edited volumes routinely flag unevenness, but the concern here is subtler: a book about the cultural and institutional dimensions of climate action, written almost entirely by researchers embedded in one institutional culture, inevitably limits the range of cultures and institutions it can genuinely illuminate.

The second problem concerns the book’s claim to speak for Asia. The review notes that the Asian context claimed by the volume excludes major economies such as China and India, the two most populous countries on Earth and two of the world’s largest emitters. Any framework that aspires to describe decarbonization in Asia while omitting these economies faces an obvious applicability problem. Climate policy in China and India involves distinctive political economies, energy systems, and development trajectories, and a transition methodology developed without reference to them will have limited transferability across the region.

Related to this is the review’s criticism of the transition methodology itself. The volume’s framework for moving to a carbon neutral society, the reviewer argues, falls short in terms of applicability: the analysis of how societies actually change is thinner than the analysis of why they should. And the collection, for all its attention to ethics and institutions, neglects issues of power, inequality, financing, and conflicts among stakeholders. These omissions matter. Political economy scholarship on climate change has documented in detail how fossil fuel interests, labor movements, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries shape transition outcomes, while climate justice research has shown that decarbonization policies can redistribute burdens in ways that harm the least advantaged. A roadmap that does not specify who pays, who decides, and who loses is vulnerable to the same critiques it might level at purely technological accounts.

The broader lesson of the review extends well beyond one book. As governments codify net zero targets into law and investors scrutinize corporate transition plans, the social sciences are being asked not just to interpret decarbonization but to design it. That task requires integration across disciplines that have historically worked apart: economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history. The volume edited by Akao and Washizu demonstrates how much such integration can reveal, from the moral status of future generations to the institutional lock-in of urban form and the fate of centuries-old irrigation systems under modern environmental policy. The review’s critique demonstrates how far the field still has to go, particularly in accounting for power and finance, and in testing its frameworks against the diverse realities of the Asian continent. The path to carbon neutrality, on this evidence, will be decided as much in institutions, cultures, and distributional politics as in laboratories and power plants, and the scholars best equipped to trace that path must be as numerous and varied as the societies the transition is meant to transform.

Subject of Research: A book review assessing social science perspectives on achieving a carbon neutral society

Article Title: Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu. Climate change issues and social sciences towards a carbon neutral society

Article References: Ulum, Ö. G. (2026). Ken-Ichi Akao and Ayu Washizu. Climate change issues and social sciences towards a carbon neutral society. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01146-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01146-4

Keywords: carbon neutrality, climate change, social sciences, climate justice, just transition, intergenerational equity, decarbonization, sustainability disclosure, Asia, Waseda University, political economy, SDGs