The Means and End of Greenwash

Abstract

Corporate claims about environmental performance have increased rapidly in recent years, as has the incidence of greenwash, that is, communication that misleads people into forming overly positive beliefs about an organization’s environmental practices or products. References to greenwash in the literature have grown rapidly since the term was introduced more than 2 decades ago, with a sharp increase in articles since 2011. We review and synthesize this fragmented and multidisciplinary literature, showing that greenwash is a broad umbrella term that encompasses a variety of specific forms of misleading environmental communication. More research is needed that identifies and catalogues the varieties of greenwash, theorizes and models their mechanisms drawing on existing social science research, and measures their impacts on corporate performance and social welfare.