The Value Relevance of Sustainable Governance: How Cultural Peculiarities Reshape Priorities and Impacts

Business Strategy and the Environment. 2026. P. 1–17.

Evgeniia Kiseleva, Cardoni A., Elena Makeeva, Mamaeva P.

This study investigates the relevance of sustainable governance (SG) and its impactful elements in the context of the Russian market, a unique case of an isolated economy, using market value as a proxy for concept relevance. Adopting stakeholder and institutional approaches, this study uses panel data from 152 firms listed on the Moscow Exchange from 2020 to 2023 to analyze the SG concept in consistency with the World Economic Forum's governance framework, which decomposes SG into strategic, stakeholder, and anticorruption components. The findings reveal a significant, positive association between SG and firm market value, confirming the overall relevance of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) triad's “G” component, even in a geopolitically isolated and institutionally distinctive context, although each SG component's value relevance differs. This study contributes to the stakeholder theory literature by highlighting the need to consistently contextualize global frameworks with institutional motivations and contributes to the broader debates on cultural specificity in governance theory.

Keywords: stakeholder theory, Russian market, institutional theory, sustainable corporate governance, value relevance