Balancing greenwashing and genuine change: How environmental management and technology drive sustainable corporate...

Corporate sustainability faces a central dilemma: do environmental initiatives deliver genuine improvement or merely constitute greenwashing? This study compares environmental management, represented by the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System (EMS), and environmental technology, represented by Cleaner Production Practices (CPP), using a staggered difference in differences design and panel data on 57,512 EMS-certified and 17,119 CPP-audited Chinese manufacturing firms from 2000 to 2012. Both approaches enhance environmental and economic performance, yet CPP achieves greater reductions in SO₂ and COD emissions, while EMS more strongly stimulates R&D investment and green technology innovation. CPP also eases financing constraints, whereas joint adoption yields no synergistic gains, suggesting symbolic compliance. Positive effects are concentrated among heavily polluting, small and medium-sized, non-exporting firms in less regulated regions, while large exporters and firms in stricter contexts exhibit patterns consistent with greenwashing. These findings clarify when environmental management and environmental technology drive substantive sustainability transitions and when they serve as symbolic adoption, offering critical insights for corporate strategy and policy design.