Corporate Environmental Disclosure in India: An Analysis of Multinational and Domestic Agrochemical Corporations

 The existing corporate environmental disclosure (CED) research focuses primarily on large companies operating in a single jurisdiction, leaving a gap of knowledge regarding the subsidiary operations of multinational corporations. In this study, consolidated narrative interrogation (CONI) is used to quantify CEDs presented in annual and stand-alone sustainability reports published over a 15-year span between 2002 and 2016 by agrochemical companies operating in India. Results show that the diversity, the quantity, and the quality of CED vary significantly, but generally each of them has been improving over time—most notably following the revisions to the Companies Act in 2013. The study finds that the subsidiaries of multinational agrochemical corporations implemented CED practices more strongly associated with those of domestic companies than those found in the reports produced by their parent companies. The CED of both subsidiary and domestic companies appears to reflect concerns of local legitimacy.