Corporate greenwashing: does it really add value? From the need of a system of measurement to the role of managers and policymakers.

The main focus of the thesis is to introduce the threatening phenomenon of greenwashing, with particular attention to that generated by corporations, and analyze the pivotal root causes that might be accountable for its generation so as to allow managers, policymakers, and other organizations to take the right actions against it. Therefore, before digging into the determinants endangering the aforementioned plague, we will primarily discuss the boundaries within which we need to collocate the concept of corporate greenwashing. In particular, we will refer the increasing interest toward the achievement of sustainable goals that has been fascinating both investors, policymakers, companies, and NGOs from the Paris Agreement all the way to COP26, where not only stakeholders stressed the focus on climate but also on CSR goals. Therefore, whenever we talk about corporate greenwashing, we will often refer to the more general context of CSR issues. Secondarily, we will explore the two paths leading up to this problem and being generally embodied by both external and internal drivers. Among the former, we can claim the responsibility assumed by governments that - by choosing a policy rather than another - have the power to drive companies toward the adoption of different kinds of green investments which can be more or less oriented to innovation. Hence, we finally propose some pieces of advice that policymakers should follow in order to achieve a more dynamic and innovation-driven set of policies, among which one of them is essentially represented by the need of measuring the greenwashing level of a company, hence three different systems of measurement are presented. Among the latter bunch of causes, the responsibility assumed by companies is instead of pivotal importance not only due to the fact that managers need to understand that there is a strong linkage between business and societal results, but also because they need to accept the fact that each company has to focus the CSR issues it is able to address, and does not have to pretend to solve all the issues at once. Moreover, as well as in the previous case, pieces of advice are given to companies in order to improve the quality of their choices in the boundaries of the obtainment of CSR and business goals. Lastly, some information concerning the behavior that should be adopted by NGOs are shared.