A Diagnostic Tool for Evaluating Discursive Misrepresentation in Sovereign and Corporate Green Bonds

• Abiodun Okunola

  Ladoke Akintola University Technology

  Author

Green bonds have become a central instrument of sustainable finance, yet the credibility of issuers’ environmental claims remains unevenly scrutinized. Existing diagnostic approaches rely heavily on post-issuance allocation reporting, ESG ratings, or project-level life-cycle assessment, none of which systematically captures discursive misrepresentation—the gap between the rhetorical framing of a bond’s environmental purpose and the substantive commitments encoded in its documentation. This study develops and validates a diagnostic instrument for evaluating discursive misrepresentation in sovereign and corporate green bond disclosures. Drawing on performative purpose alignment theory and signalling theory, the research constructs a four-dimensional coding framework—claim specificity, temporal bindingness, omission architecture, and directive-evidentiary balance—and applies it to a stratified sample of 312 green bond frameworks and offering documents issued between 2018 and 2025 across 24 jurisdictions. The instrument achieves an inter-rater reliability of 0.87 (Krippendorff’s α) and a classification accuracy of 89.4% against expert-assigned credibility ratings, outperforming a sentiment-based baseline by 23.1 percentage points. Findings indicate that sovereign issuers exhibit systematically higher omission architecture scores than corporate issuers, while corporate issuers display greater variance in directive-evidentiary balance. The diagnostic tool offers regulators, investors, and researchers a replicable method for moving beyond disclosure-presence checks toward disclosure-quality assessment, thereby strengthening the accountability infrastructure of the green bond market.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abiodun Okunola (Author)

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