5 Abstract This article examines the emerging phenomenon of ‘greenhushing’ – the deliberate withholding of information regarding a company's environmental or broader sustainability performance, even when genuine sustainability efforts are underway. Greenhushing can be understood broadly as a reaction to the regulatory and stakeholder scrutiny surrounding greenwashing, when companies exaggerate their positive environmental or sustainability performance or impacts. Whilst keeping quiet might be an understandable reaction as corporate actors see greenwashing being heavily criticised and subject to legal challenge, such greenhushing may also be criticised for its potential to undermine corporate trust and threaten a company's social license to operate, bringing its own risk of legal liabilities for the company and its directors. Greenhushing could provide short-term advantages by helping a company to avoid criticism, but its long-term consequences might be more destructive as it could lead to the erosion of stakeholder confidence and damage to a company’s brand reputation, as well as impede collective sustainability progress. Some of the motivations for greenhushing arise from the complexities and limitations in the regulatory landscapes, regional and global, which stand in the way of transparent and effective communication and accountability. More fundamentally, corporate law and governance is a breeding ground for competitive and defensive behaviours such as greenhushing. This raises a need for the corporate law framework to be redesigned to encourage a culture of transparency and collaboration. The article suggests that regulatory changes – to incentivise honest and effective transparency and deter dishonesty, exaggeration or omission of material information – are necessary, both to improve formal regulatory responses and to support boardrooms to build positive stakeholder communications and secure a genuine social licence to operate.
Charlotte Villiers (Sun,) studied this question.