ESG PERFORMANCE AND CORPORATE REPUTATION: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF POST-2020 STUDIES

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance has become a central determinant of corporate legitimacy, particularly in the post-2020 era when global disruptions and sustainability imperatives reshaped stakeholder expectations. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) of 23 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025 to critically examine the relationship between ESG performance and corporate reputation, with an emphasis on emerging economies such as Nigeria. The findings reveal persistent conceptual ambiguities in defining and measuring reputation, with approaches ranging from stakeholder surveys to disclosure indices and market proxies. Empirical evidence generally supports a positive ESG–reputation linkage, though the strength and persistence of this relationship are contingent on mediating factors (e.g., transparency, stakeholder engagement, legitimacy) and moderating conditions (e.g., regulatory enforcement, industry visibility, firm size, governance quality). Sectoral and contextual differences are especially pronounced in Nigeria, where community-level pressures and weak regulatory enforcement shape reputation formation differently from developed markets. The review highlights gaps in methodological diversity, with quantitative approaches dominating while qualitative and mixed methods remain underutilized. Theoretically, stakeholder and legitimacy perspectives dominate, but recent contributions point to the need for integrating institutional and reputation capital theories to account for emerging market dynamics. The paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda that emphasizes multi-method triangulation, context-sensitive theoretical refinement, and hybrid measurement approaches capable of capturing both relational and market-based dimensions of reputation.