A Multi-Level Diagnostic Tool for Detecting Symbolic vs. Substantive Environmental Claims in Global Supply Chains

• Abbas Ahsun

  Texas University

  Author

Global supply chains have become a primary site of corporate environmental claims, yet regulators increasingly report that a substantial share of these claims lack verifiable substantiation across upstream tiers. Existing diagnostic approaches rely predominantly on firm-level disclosure analysis, failing to capture the tier-specific divergence between symbolic rhetoric and substantive operational change. This study develops and validates a multi-level diagnostic tool that integrates textual signal analysis, tier-level verification gaps, and temporal commitment consistency to classify environmental claims as symbolic or substantive. Using a dataset of 1,247 supplier-buyer claim pairs drawn from publicly available sustainability disclosures across three manufacturing-intensive sectors, the tool was tested against expert-coded ground truth (n = 312 claims; inter-rater κ = 0.84). The hybrid diagnostic model achieved 89.4% classification accuracy, outperforming keyword-based baselines by 23.7 percentage points. Feature importance analysis identified upstream verification absence and aspirational language density as the strongest predictors of symbolic claims. The framework offers regulators and supply chain managers a replicable, tier-sensitive instrument for pre-emptive claim screening, reducing reliance on retrospective enforcement. Academic implications include a reconceptualization of greenwashing as a multi-level governance failure rather than a firm-level communicative act.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abbas Ahsun (Author)

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