Christof Weinhardt

Amidst the rapidly evolving landscape of digital participation formats, navigating the field becomes a challenge for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. This paper investigates how a taxonomy for digital involvement projects can be leveraged to capture design knowledge on participatory projects and make it accessible to relevant stakeholders. Employing a Design Science Research approach, we develop and assess an interactive web application, and preliminary design archetypes based on 46 project examples. Our research contributes to capturing the diversity of participatory project design, bridging theory and practice in the digital governance domain and beyond.

Greenwashing poses a significant challenge to the fight against climate change by undermining trust in corporate sustainability claims. This study introduces the Greenwashing Tendency Score (GTS), an automated method designed to detect greenwashing tendencies in corporate sustainability reports. By leveraging sentiment and alignment analysis techniques in conjunction with ESG ratings, the GTS quantifies discrepancies between reported and actual sustainability performance. We applied our methodology to 36 DAX40 companies over the years 2020 to 2022. Our key findings reveal substantial variations in greenwashing tendencies among these companies, emphasizing the need for more transparent and reliable sustainability reporting. The GTS emerged as a scalable, reproducible, and objective tool that can aid investors, regulators, NGOs, and companies in identifying and addressing greenwashing practices. This research not only contributes to the sustainable finance literature but also provides actionable insights for stakeholders committed to fostering accountability and integrity in corporate sustainability communications.