Mapping ESG leadership education in higher education: a systematic review and conceptual synthesis of governance-informed learning pathways

The growing institutional emphasis on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles has created new expectations for higher education institutions to prepare graduates who can engage with governance accountability, stakeholder responsibility, and sustainability-oriented decision-making. However, ESG is often conflated with broader sustainability education, and less is known about how ESG leadership education is conceptualized in higher education research. This study presents a systematic literature review and bibliometric synthesis of 72 peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025 and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Supported by thematic coding, descriptive statistics, and limited exploratory co-occurrence analysis, the review examines how ESG leadership education is represented, organized, and conceptually linked to governance-informed learning within the indexed literature. The study does not provide primary empirical evidence of student-level competency gains, institutional transformation, or societal impact. Instead, its core contribution is to synthesize the conceptual, methodological, and thematic structure of the field and to propose a literature-derived ESG leadership pathway framework. The findings indicate a marked increase in ESG-related leadership education research after 2020. Experiential learning, curriculum integration, governance literacy, and ESG integration frequently appeared alongside leadership competency themes; however, these patterns reflect associations within published studies rather than causal evidence of educational effectiveness. This review contributes by reframing ESG leadership education as a governance-informed extension of broader sustainability competency models rather than as an entirely separate educational framework. Because the dataset was restricted to Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed articles, the findings may underrepresent gray literature, local journals, institutional reports, and practice-based innovations from developing regions. The proposed framework should therefore be understood as a conceptual synthesis rather than a validated empirical model.