ESG reporting under uncertainty – experts’ individual perspectives

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of ESG reporting in the context of growing regulatory uncertainty in the European Union, resulting from the simultaneous implementation of the CSRD, the ESRS standards, and the announced partial revisions under the Omnibus packages. The article aims to identify the challenges facing companies covered by the CSRD with regard to sustainability reporting. The study is qualitative and based on semi‑structured expert interviews with people responsible for ESG reporting, its implementation, or oversight. The applied thematic analysis enabled the reconstruction of dominant interpretive patterns and the tensions between the regulatory logic of standardisation and organisational realities. The findings point to the ambivalent nature of assessments of ESG regulation: respondents recognise the value of standardisation, comparability and audit as prerequisites for credible disclosures, while criticising the excessive complexity of the ESRS, high implementation costs, and the destabilising effect of how regulatory changes have been introduced on reporting processes. By conceptualising regulatory uncertainty as an active mechanism shaping expert sense-making and market responses, the article advances sustainability reporting research by showing that ESG reporting is at risk of being reframed as a compliance-driven exercise rather than a managerial and transformative tool in the absence of stable, proportionate and interpretively coherent regulatory frameworks.