Doing more than they say: Hidden ESG as a practice–visibility mismatch in Ukrainian agriculture

In advanced economies, critiques of ESG reporting often center on a “talk–action” gap: firms may communicate ambitious sustainability narratives while leaving underlying practices largely unchanged. The best-known manifestation is greenwashing, where polished reports and messaging can overstate commitments and mislead stakeholders (Jauernig and Valentinov, 2019; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015; Cho et al., 2015). This concern has driven increasing attention to disclosure quality, verification and standardization in ESG reporting infrastructures (Ioannou and Serafeim, 2015). In agriculture, greenwashing risks are especially salient because sustainability claims can interact with external incentives and monitoring regimes such as agri-environmental schemes (Castillo-Díaz et al., 2025; Muriel et al., 2025; Sciortino et al., 2025; Montero-Navarro et al., 2021; Unay-Gailhard and Bojnec, 2016).

Recent debates have expanded beyond over-disclosure to consider under-disclosure. The emerging notion of greenhushing highlights cases where firms deliberately downplay or withhold sustainability communication, often because of fears of being accused of greenwashing or becoming targets of scrutiny (Dias et al., 2025; Rasche, 2025; Guercini et al., 2025; Hilton, 2025). However, both greenwashing and greenhushing discussions typically assume relatively stable institutional settings in which formal reporting systems exist and where disclosure choices can be modeled primarily as strategic communication decisions.

This paper argues that those assumptions are too narrow for transition and conflict-affected economies such as Ukraine, where reporting infrastructures and institutional conditions can make ESG communication less a matter of strategy and more a matter of institutional capacity, trust and legibility. Transition economies often face fragmented institutions, uneven digital capacity, high compliance costs and pervasive distrust toward state authorities (Krasodomska, 2025; Agarwal, 2025; Albu et al., 2024). Under these conditions, the key analytical question is not only whether firms exaggerate or conceal but also whether substantive sustainability practices become publicly legible in forms that external stakeholders – investors, lenders, policymakers and buyers – can recognize and use.

To sharpen this problem, we distinguish between two dimensions that are often conflated in ESG debates: ESG practice (what enterprises do) and ESG visibility (what becomes legible to external stakeholders through standardized or widely recognized disclosure channels). The configuration that motivates this study is one in which firms implement substantive ESG-relevant practices, while those practices remain weakly visible in formal ESG reporting channels. We refer to this configuration as hidden ESG reporting. Importantly, we use “hidden ESG” as a descriptive label for an empirically observable practice–visibility mismatch, rather than as a claim that under-disclosure is always a deliberate communication strategy. This positioning also clarifies the relationship to greenhushing: where greenhushing is commonly conceptualized as strategic silence within mature reporting systems (Dias et al., 2025; Rasche, 2025; Guercini et al., 2025; Hilton, 2025), hidden ESG is expected to be more prevalent where disclosure is constrained by institutional fragmentation, limited capacity and distrust (Krasodomska, 2025; Agarwal, 2025; Albu et al., 2024).

Existing research already points to a similar under-disclosure pattern in Ukraine. For example, Ukrainian enterprises have been shown to engage in genuine sustainability-relevant actions while reporting them in ways that remain largely unrecognized by international stakeholders (Metelytsia et al., 2025). Building on this prior evidence, our study asks what sustains the persistence of this practice–visibility gap and why it matters for ESG governance in a setting characterized by institutional fragility and crisis conditions. Here, wartime disruption is treated as a salient contextual condition shaping organizational priorities and perceived reporting risks – not as a pre-war versus wartime causal comparison, as our evidence is based on interviews conducted during wartime.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers and institutional implications of hidden ESG reporting in Ukrainian agriculture. Drawing on 53 structured qualitative interviews with agricultural enterprises conducted across Ukraine between June and August 2025, we find that many firms engage in substantive sustainability initiatives – such as soil conservation, demining, support for displaced populations and decentralized storage – yet refrain from disclosing them through formal ESG channels. Reporting, when it occurs, is often fragmented across environmental or tax submissions or remains confined to local stakeholders such as landowners and community leaders. In effect, these enterprises do more than they say, creating an information asymmetry that reverses the more familiar critique of ESG as “talk without action.”

This visibility problem has immediate policy and governance relevance in Ukraine because the country is aligning its regulatory and financial architecture with EU sustainability reporting frameworks. In 2024, the government adopted a national strategy for implementing sustainability reporting and harmonizing domestic standards with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (BDO Ukraine, 2025). A draft law introduced in 2025 seeks to embed ESG disclosure within Ukraine’s accounting framework, with phased implementation – large firms by 2026 and listed SMEs by 2028. At the same time, financial regulators, including the National Bank, are integrating ESG principles into lending criteria and risk management (Info Center “Green Dossier,” 2025; BDO Ukraine, 2025). In this environment, low ESG visibility is not merely a communications choice; it can influence access to sustainability-linked finance, procurement eligibility, policy dialogue and the credibility of Ukraine’s broader EU-alignment efforts.

Ukraine’s agricultural sector is a revealing empirical context for studying hidden ESG for two related reasons. First, the sector is economically and socially central – anchoring rural employment, food security and export-oriented growth – while also being deeply affected by wartime disruption and reconstruction priorities. Second, the sector contains large internationally exposed agroholdings alongside many smaller and non-listed enterprises with uneven reporting capacity. Yet scholarship on ESG reporting in Ukrainian agriculture has primarily examined large agroholdings – capital-intensive enterprises more responsive to investor expectations and transnational scrutiny (Gagalyuk et al., 2021; Metelytsia et al., 2025). This leaves a consequential empirical gap concerning the enterprises that constitute much of the sector’s operational backbone. At the same time, we do not claim novelty simply by mentioning SMEs: rather, the analytical value of Ukraine lies in the combination of: institutional fragility, crisis conditions and rising EU-aligned reporting expectations that together can amplify the practice–visibility gap. In this sense, Ukrainian smaller and non-listed enterprises are not important because they are “SMEs per se,” but because their reporting capacity and institutional positioning can make them especially likely to enact sustainability without achieving external legibility (Metelytsia et al., 2025).

This framing also clarifies what we mean by the paper’s ethical and practical stakes. Hidden ESG can create an ethical disjunction not because silent sustainability is inherently wrong, but because visibility structures recognition and allocation: enterprises that lack legible disclosure can be misclassified as “non-ESG,” excluded from resources or partnerships that increasingly depend on ESG evidence and marginalized in policy conversations despite substantive local contributions. In other words, the ethical concern is a governance concern: reporting systems can unintentionally privilege reporting capacity over sustainability performance, producing inequities in recognition and access – especially under conditions of transition and conflict.

Our study contributes in three ways. First, it refines ESG reporting debates by conceptualizing under-disclosure as a practice–visibility configuration that is likely to arise under institutional fragmentation and low trust, complementing dominant concerns with greenwashing and the emerging literature on greenhushing (Jauernig and Valentinov, 2019; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015; Cho et al., 2015; Dias et al., 2025; Rasche, 2025; Guercini et al., 2025; Hilton, 2025). We theorize hidden ESG through legitimacy theory and institutional/decoupling perspectives and show what it reveals about incomplete institutionalization of sustainability accounting. Second, it extends empirical knowledge of ESG reporting in Ukrainian agriculture beyond the current emphasis on large agroholdings by analyzing a broader set of agricultural enterprises while situating SME-related claims within the specific constraints of conflict and institutional fragility (Gagalyuk et al., 2021; Metelytsia et al., 2025). Third, it identifies policy-relevant implications for Ukraine’s EU-aligned ESG integration: if reporting infrastructures remain costly, fragmented and low-trust, then they may systematically under-recognize substantive sustainability action and thereby weaken both accountability and incentive effects (Info Center “Green Dossier,” 2025; BDO Ukraine, 2025).

The article proceeds as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature on ESG in agriculture with a focus on transition economies and develops the practice–visibility framing that motivates the concept of hidden ESG. Section 3 outlines the methodology. Section 4 presents empirical findings organized around hidden practices, barriers and moral and institutional logics under wartime conditions. Section 5 discusses theoretical implications. Section 6 offers policy recommendations for Ukraine’s ESG integration with the EU.

This section develops the paper’s conceptual foundation. Section 2.1 introduces an action–visibility lens for ESG reporting in CEE and clarifies why reporting “gaps” can reflect low intensity, low visibility or a mismatch between the two. Section 2.2 explains why agriculture amplifies this visibility problem through sectoral asymmetries in exposure and reporting capacity. Section 2.3 then situates the argument within Western visibility debates (greenwashing and greenhushing), while extending them through legitimacy and institutional perspectives to introduce representation-layer decoupling and infrastructure-constrained invisibility. Finally, Section 2.4 specifies what is new in the Ukrainian case and delineates the conceptual boundary between greenhushing and hidden ESG that guides the empirical analysis.

ESG reporting is long established as a mainstream managerial practice in advanced economies, but its diffusion into the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has occurred under markedly different institutional conditions. In this literature, a consistent finding is a persistent “sustainability reporting gap” between CEE and Western Europe, associated with post-socialist legacies, corruption risks, weak civic institutions and limited engagement from government and civil society organizations (Krasodomska, 2025). Zyznarska-Dworczak (2022) further argues that heightened economic, political and business uncertainty undermines the credibility and substantive depth of corporate reporting in the region. These conditions have also shaped the form that ESG reporting takes: rather than emerging from internally embedded accountability norms, it is frequently driven by external imperatives, most notably EU integration and investor expectations (Albu et al., 2024). In response, many CEE countries have pursued institutional convergence by adapting sustainability reporting architecture toward EU frameworks, including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (Krasodomska, 2025; Zyznarska-Dworczak, 2022). Yet progress remains uneven, constrained by deficits in reporting quality, scope and institutional capacity (Krasodomska, 2025; Zyznarska-Dworczak, 2022). In Ukraine, these challenges are compounded by the disruptions of war and the absence of robust regulatory enforcement, which together widen the region’s sustainability reporting gap.

A second, closely related stream of research emphasizes that ESG reporting in CEE remains characterized by fragmentation, limited voluntariness, weak attention to social dimensions and a prevailing focus on formal compliance rather than substantive disclosure (Albu et al., 2024); Panfilo and Krasodomska's (2021) comparative study of climate-risk disclosure across 22 European countries complements this account by showing that reporting practices reflect cultural-cognitive patterns and varying levels of institutional maturity, with CEE countries generally exhibiting lower maturity than Western counterparts. Collectively, these studies suggest that sustainability reporting frameworks conceived in stable Western economies have only recently begun to permeate post-communist business culture (Albu et al., 2024; Panfilo and Krasodomska, 2021). Even within the CEE region, variation persists: Poland and the Baltic states are often described as progressing more rapidly, supported by earlier reforms and deeper EU integration (Krasodomska, 2025).

At first glance, the CEE evidence on fragmented, compliance-oriented reporting may appear inconsistent with the phenomenon that motivates this paper – firms doing more in practice than they report. The apparent tension arises from treating “reporting weakness” as a single dimension. To reconcile these studies, we distinguish between two interrelated dimensions of ESG that are often conflated: ESG reporting intensity and ESG reporting visibility. Intensity refers to the extent to which enterprises implement substantive sustainability initiatives such as environmental stewardship, social responsibility and governance systems. Visibility refers to the degree to which these practices are made legible to external stakeholders through standardized disclosures or recognizable communication channels.

This distinction is grounded directly in the prior CEE literature cited above. Studies describing fragmentation, compliance logics and limited voluntariness (Albu et al., 2024) are primarily diagnosing weak visibility: limited public legibility, limited comparability and limited usability for external audiences. By contrast, studies emphasizing institutional instability and credibility deficits (Zyznarska-Dworczak, 2022) point to conditions that can suppress both intensity (what firms can implement) and visibility (what they can disclose credibly and safely). Similarly, the “reporting gap” described by Krasodomska (2025) can reflect a combination of lower intensity, lower visibility or both – depending on sector and firm type. Finally, cross-national differences in institutional maturity (Panfilo and Krasodomska, 2021) plausibly affect the ease with which practices can be translated into standardized disclosures, that is, visibility. In short, the CEE literature does not contradict the possibility of hidden ESG; rather, it motivates a more precise: under what institutional conditions does weak reporting infrastructure produce merely low reporting engagement and under what conditions does it produce a practice–visibility mismatch (high intensity, low visibility)?

This is why visibility is analytically significant. Visibility is not simply “more communication.” It is the mechanism through which sustainability practice becomes legible to investors, lenders, regulators and buyers in standardized terms. Where visibility is weak, substantive practice can remain locally meaningful yet externally unrecognized, producing an allocation and governance problem: resources, legitimacy and policy attention may flow toward enterprises with reporting capacity rather than toward those with sustainability performance. This concern is particularly acute in transition economies where EU integration and investor expectations drive reporting adoption (Albu et al., 2024) but institutional capacity and trust remain uneven (Krasodomska, 2025; Zyznarska-Dworczak, 2022).

The visibility dimension becomes especially salient in agriculture because sector structure tends to produce large differences in external exposure and reporting capacity. Major agribusinesses and food processors with international operations and financing are more likely to adopt global reporting standards and align with high-visibility frameworks to signal credible environmental and social commitments. Smaller, domestically oriented enterprises are typically less engaged in both implementing comprehensive sustainability initiatives and reporting them, especially when non-financial disclosure remains largely voluntary (Appiah-Kubi, 2024). This creates a sectoral “visibility gradient”: a subset of large, internationally exposed firms become highly legible to external stakeholders, while a broad base of smaller and non-listed enterprises remains less visible.

In Ukraine, this asymmetry is amplified by the prominence of large agroholdings in land ownership, export orientation and political influence (Gagalyuk et al., 2021). These firms, which face international investor scrutiny and often depend on foreign credit, have begun issuing reports aligned with frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) (Metelytsia et al., 2025). By contrast, smaller and medium-sized enterprises – often described as the backbone of Ukrainian agriculture - remain comparatively invisible in both scholarship and practice despite their significance for food security, employment and European integration (Metelytsia et al., 2025; Strakova et al., 2025). Importantly, this does not imply that SMEs are uniformly inactive on sustainability. Rather, the sectoral and institutional structure suggests that visibility is distributed unevenly: those most capable of producing standardized disclosure are most visible, while many smaller and non-listed enterprises have fewer pathways to external legibility. This uneven distribution of visibility creates a risk that sustainability governance will privilege “who can report” over “who performs,” especially when reporting becomes tied to finance and market access.

The question of ESG visibility has been widely explored in Western scholarship, where a core debate concerns whether sustainability reports reflect organizational behavior or serve as instruments of impression management (Jauernig and Valentinov, 2019; Cho et al., 2015; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015). These debates are typically underpinned – often implicitly – by a legitimacy logic: ESG disclosures are treated as vehicles through which organizations seek pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy from external audiences (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Suchman, 1995). In this view, visibility is not merely “communication” but also a mechanism of accountability and social evaluation: reporting converts internal practices into publicly legible accounts that can sustain legitimacy claims (Deegan, 2002, 2019).

A first and well-established visibility pathology within this literature is greenwashing – high visibility paired with weak or ambiguous underlying performance. Greenwashing and symbolic ESG remain central to critiques of ESG reporting because they can generate legitimacy benefits without commensurate organizational change (Jauernig and Valentinov, 2019; Cho et al., 2015; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015). For example, D’Ecclesia et al. (2025) demonstrate that sustainability commitments may fail to translate into compliance with ESG requirements, highlighting the risk of high visibility coupled with weak performance. In agriculture and agri-food, these dynamics are particularly salient: greenwashing can create information asymmetries, distort competition and erode confidence in sustainable business practices (Montero-Navarro et al., 2021; Sciortino et al., 2025). Yet despite growing public demand for transparency, agriculture remains one of the least examined fields in ESG reporting (Muriel et al., 2025). Recent evidence also underscores increasing regulatory attention to transparency in the EU agri-food market, including Directive (EU) 2024/825 aimed at combating environmental deception (Sciortino et al., 2025). Taken together, this stream highlights how visibility can be mobilized strategically and why regulators increasingly attempt to stabilize the credibility of sustainability claims.

More recently, Western ESG scholarship has turned to the opposite visibility problem: deliberate under-communication of sustainability practices, widely referred to as greenhushing. Dias et al. (2025) identify greenhushing and related notions – such as greenblushing, silent green and silent sustainability – as an emerging frontier in sustainability communication research. Greenhushing also has a legal dimension, as firms may withhold information to minimize exposure to audits, scandals or litigation, potentially diminishing market transparency (Rasche, 2025). Empirically, Guercini et al. (2025) show that Italian firms engaged in sustainability may refrain from communication because of fear of greenwashing accusations or limited digital communication capacity. Hilton (2025) similarly interprets greenhushing as an adaptive response to conflicting expectations from investors, regulators and society, especially under political or institutional uncertainty. A complementary strand emphasizes that under-disclosure may reflect strategic responses to disclosure costs and enforcement risks, rather than an absence of underlying practices (Zhang et al., 2025).

At the same time, these Western visibility debates typically presume that reporting infrastructures are sufficiently available and trusted such that (non-)disclosure is, at least to an important degree, a choice. That presumption is not always warranted. Institutional theory suggests that the ability of organizations to produce externally credible accounts depends on field-level infrastructures (standards, verification capacity, professional support, trust in assurance and enforcement predictability) and on the stability of institutional expectations (Oliver, 1991; Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). Where such infrastructures are fragmented or distrusted, practice–visibility mismatches may arise as a structural outcome rather than primarily a strategic one. This connects to contemporary reconceptualizations of decoupling (Bromley and Powell, 2012; Jauernig and Valentinov, 2019): beyond “talk–action” gaps, organizations may also experience representation-layer decoupling, in which substantive practices exist but cannot be consistently translated into auditable, comparable and institutionally recognizable accounts. In such settings, limited visibility constrains external legitimacy not because firms aim to hide but because the field-level infrastructures and trust conditions needed for credible visibility are missing or costly to assemble – thereby limiting the organization’s capacity to convert practice into recognized legitimacy (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Suchman, 1995; Deegan, 2002, 2019).

This distinction clarifies the conceptual gap that motivates our notion of hidden ESG. While greenhushing foregrounds strategic silence under reputational, legal or political risks (Rasche, 2025; Hilton, 2025), hidden ESG foregrounds infrastructure-constrained invisibility – a practice–visibility mismatch produced by specific institutional conditions (Bromley and Powell, 2012; Oliver, 1991), including institutional fragility, low trust and misaligned accountability/reporting infrastructures. Table 1 summarizes these visibility outcomes and highlights how hidden ESG adds a distinct mechanism to existing visibility debates, thereby extending current discussions beyond the greenwashing–greenhushing polarity.

Across transitional agricultural sectors, both extremes of visibility – overstatement and understatement – can occur. However, emerging evidence suggests that understatement is particularly salient in Ukraine. Drawing on interviews with Ukrainian agricultural enterprises, Metelytsia et al. (2025) show that many firms engaged in genuine ESG behavior during wartime – providing humanitarian assistance, conserving resources and supporting local communities – yet refrained from reporting these actions in standardized formats accessible to investors or policymakers, even though they remained visible to local stakeholders. The authors attribute this under-disclosure to limited administrative capacity, uncertain benefits and distrust toward state oversight (Metelytsia et al., 2025). Although this pattern resembles Western greenhushing, Metelytsia et al. (2025) interpret it differently: not as strategic silence, but as authenticity and necessity – enterprises acting from moral conviction rather than regulatory compliance. Their invisibility, however, excludes them from recognition, sustainability-linked finance and policy dialogue (Metelytsia et al., 2025).

This paper builds on that evidence but differs from it in three ways, which together clarify what our study adds. First, we propose an explicit conceptual distinction between practice (intensity) and public legibility (visibility) and use this distinction to theorize under-disclosure as a configuration rather than as a generic label for “not reporting.” That is, the analytical object is not low disclosure per se but the high-intensity/low-visibility quadrant – enterprises that implement substantive practices yet remain weakly legible in formal ESG channels. Second, by integrating the CEE institutional literature (Krasodomska, 2025; Albu et al., 2024; Zyznarska-Dworczak, 2022; Panfilo and Krasodomska, 2021) with the greenwashing/greenhushing debate (Jauernig and Valentinov, 2019; Cho et al., 2015; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015; Dias et al., 2025; Rasche, 2025; Guercini et al., 2025; Hilton, 2025), we specify the mechanism behind this configuration as a translation problem: institutional fragmentation, uneven capacity and low trust can prevent sustainability practice from being converted into standardized disclosures that external stakeholders can use. Third, we use 53 interviews in Ukrainian agriculture (Metelytsia et al., 2025; Gagalyuk et al., 2021; Strakova et al., 2025) to examine how this translation problem manifests, what barriers sustain it and what institutional implications follow for EU-aligned ESG governance and sustainability-linked finance.

On this basis, we conceptualize hidden ESG reporting as a specific practice–visibility configuration: a structural and institutional silence in which enterprises do more than they say because reporting infrastructures, incentives and trust conditions make public legibility difficult or risky. This differs from greenhushing as typically defined in the Western literature, where under-communication is framed as a deliberate choice by firms with established reporting systems that choose silence to reduce scrutiny or reputational risk (Dias et al., 2025; Rasche, 2025; Guercini et al., 2025; Hilton, 2025). The following sections draw on 53 qualitative interviews with Ukrainian agricultural enterprises to show how hidden ESG appears empirically, the institutional and organizational barriers that sustain it and the implications of uneven visibility for sustainability governance under conditions of transition and conflict (Metelytsia et al., 2025).

This section explains how this study’s methodology is designed to make hidden ESG empirically observable and analytically interpretable in a fragile, wartime context. Section 3.1 outlines an interpretive qualitative design with descriptive quantification. Section 3.2 details the sampling, participants and data collection procedures that ensure relevance to both operational practices and reporting decisions. Section 3.3 describes the integrated coding strategy that combines structured indicators with inductive thematic analysis to explain mechanisms, while Sections 3.4 and 3.5 document rigor and limitations appropriate to crisis-affected fieldwork.

This study uses an interpretive qualitative design with descriptive quantification to explain a specific reporting configuration in Ukrainian agriculture: high ESG practice with low ESG visibility (“hidden ESG”). Our aim is, therefore, to not only describe how enterprises enact ESG-related practices but also identify action–visibility configurations and explain the drivers and institutional implications of the high-practice/low-visibility quadrant under conditions of transition and conflict. This positioning aligns the research design directly with this paper’s purpose and allows qualitative interpretation (why under-disclosure occurs) to be supported by transparent descriptive summaries (how frequently particular practices and disclosure channels appear in the sample).

The methodological rationale is twofold. First, in Ukraine, ESG-relevant activity and ESG disclosure are often decoupled: many enterprises act in ways that are environmentally and socially consequential yet do not translate these practices into standardized, externally legible reporting. In such settings, reliance on formal reports, quantitative indicators or secondary data sets risks systematically under-observing substantive practices and misclassifying enterprises as “non-ESG.” Second, because our research question concerns the reasons behind limited visibility (rather than only the presence/quality of reports), interviews are needed to access organizational perceptions, constraints and judgments that cannot be inferred from documents alone. For these reasons, we conducted structured qualitative interviews that combine: the comparability of a standardized questionnaire (to map practices and visibility) with; and open-ended prompts (to elicit explanations for under-disclosure and its institutional logic).

This hybrid format is well suited to resource-constrained settings where respondents may lack familiarity with ESG terminology yet can describe their practices, values and reporting behaviors. The design aligns with established qualitative traditions that view interviews as particularly effective for exploring complex organizational phenomena (Bryman et al., 2021; Brinkmann and Kvale, 2015).

A key feature of the design is sequencing. This study first identifies whether an enterprise exhibits hidden ESG (high practice/low visibility) using structured items that capture implemented practices and disclosure/communication channels. Only after this identification step does the interview probe drivers of under-disclosure – capacity constraints, perceived risks, incentive structures, trust in institutions and norms around visibility. This sequencing ensures that analysis of “drivers and institutional implications” is grounded in an explicit identification of the phenomenon in the data set, rather than inferred from general sectoral claims.

The interview protocol comprised five thematic blocks. Together, they enable mapping of action and visibility, identification of hidden ESG configurations and explanation of the mechanisms sustaining under-disclosure:

1. Indicators and disclosure channels: It captures the visibility axis and the basic mapping of practice. It documents which ESG indicators are measured, where they are communicated (reports, websites and media) and what coverage exists across sustainable practices (e.g. regenerative agriculture, water management, digitalization, social and governance aspects). It also elicits barriers to implementation. Respondents rated integration on a five-point scale and assessed environmental and economic impacts. These items provide the primary basis for classifying enterprises into action–visibility configurations.

2. Strategic priorities: It probes the organizational logic that links action to (non-)disclosure. It examines how respondents balance growth and sustainability, whether they perceive an ethical responsibility to report without legal compulsion and how they assess the benefits of sustainable versus productivity-focused approaches. These questions reveal whether under-disclosure is associated with strategic prioritization, perceived irrelevance of external reporting or crisis-related triage.

3. Reporting attitudes: It targets the decision context most directly. It explores willingness to share ESG data, preferences for voluntary versus mandatory reporting and perceptions of existing reports (realistic vs “glossy”), including views on ideal reporting formats. This block is designed to surface perceived risks of visibility (e.g. scrutiny and compliance burden), distrust dynamics and beliefs about the value or legitimacy of formal ESG reporting.

4. Policy context and financial mechanisms: It connects under-disclosure to institutional incentives. It elicits evaluation of priority state support areas (productivity, innovation, social sustainability and food security), preferred ESG promotion tools (e.g. regulation, taxation and green finance) and ranking of financial instruments (loans, bonds, grants, carbon markets and guarantees). These responses illuminate whether limited visibility is reinforced by weak incentives, misaligned policy instruments or low credibility of enforcement.

5. Learning and feedback: It probes whether reporting is perceived as useful internally. It examines access to ESG-related analytics or benchmarking and the perceived value of using reporting outcomes for organizational learning and improvement. This block helps distinguish cases where visibility is low because reporting is seen as non-instrumental from cases where visibility is low despite interest but constrained by capability and infrastructure.

Through this protocol, the research develops a conceptual understanding of hidden ESG reporting – its manifestations, barriers and moral and institutional logics – and explains the drivers of under-disclosure as distinct from the better-studied phenomena of greenwashing and greenhushing.

Because hidden ESG concerns the translation of practice into disclosure, we prioritized interviewing respondents who can speak credibly about both operations and reporting choices. The interviews, therefore, targeted owners, directors, chief accountants and senior managers who oversee compliance, external communication or resource allocation. In some enterprises, production and finance managers also participated because sustainability practices and data generation are often embedded in operational and financial routines in agriculture; these roles can be critical informants about what is measured, what is documented, what is reported and what barriers prevent translation into formal disclosure. Where respondents had partial visibility into formal reporting decisions, interviews were structured to distinguish between first-hand decision knowledge and operational knowledge about practice implementation and data availability.

Data collection took place during wartime conditions and relied in part on professional networks to reach enterprises across regions. This context shaped access, respondent availability and the sensitivity of questions related to disclosure and visibility. We, therefore, adopted a pragmatic, trust-sensitive interviewing approach: ensuring confidentiality, avoiding requests for sensitive operational details and allowing respondents to frame ESG practices and reporting in their own terms. The research team’s positionality and access channels may have influenced which enterprises were reachable and which respondents were willing to speak openly; we address this by triangulating across roles within the sample, comparing structured responses with qualitative explanations and reporting descriptive distributions transparently alongside interpretive themes.

This study encompassed 53 agricultural enterprises across 15 Ukrainian regions, including both independent farms and companies integrated into agroholdings. Respondents ranged from directors and accountants to production and finance managers, enabling diverse perspectives on sustainability practices and reporting behaviors. The sample covered enterprises cultivating from several hundred to over 10,000 hectares.

A purposive sampling strategy was used to maximize diversity of ownership forms, sizes and regions – a well-established approach in qualitative research where depth and variation of perspectives take precedence over statistical representativeness (Patton, 2015). Table 2 summarizes the sample composition.

The selection of enterprises was also theoretically oriented toward the phenomenon of hidden ESG. As hidden ESG is defined as a configuration in which substantive sustainability practices coexist with low or fragmented public visibility, the sample included enterprises engaged in environmentally or socially significant activities regardless of whether they produced formalized ESG reports. The inclusion criterion was involvement in activities potentially relevant to ESG, rather than the presence of public disclosure.

This approach follows the logic of theoretically relevant and information-rich case selection, whereby cases are chosen for their capacity to illuminate the mechanisms underlying the studied configuration (Patton, 2015; Eisenhardt, 1989). It enabled the study to examine the conditions under which intensive sustainability practices do not translate into standardized public visibility, thereby directly operationalizing the practice–visibility gap.

Respondents were recruited through professional networks and sectoral associations. Participation was voluntary, motivated by recognition of the research’s societal relevance and an opportunity to articulate enterprise perspectives on sustainability and reporting challenges.

Interviews were conducted by telephone between June and August 2025, averaging 50 min each. A standardized questionnaire guided the process, combining closed-ended questions for comparability with open-ended prompts that invited elaboration. All responses were documented under confidentiality and in compliance with personal data protection requirements.

Data analysis integrated quantitative coding of structured responses with qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended data. Dichotomous items were coded as binary variables (0/1), while Likert scales (1–5) captured levels of agreement, importance or implementation intensity. Descriptive statistics summarized respondent profiles and general patterns.

Qualitative material was inductively coded to generate thematic categories reflecting enterprises’ attitudes toward ESG reporting (Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña, 2014; Saldaña, 2015). Table 3 outlines the key themes and coding structure.

This integrated qualitative design with descriptive quantification provided a comprehensive understanding of hidden ESG reporting: quantitative results offered structural overview, while qualitative insights illuminated meanings, motives and contextual drivers (Likert, 1932; Guest, MacQueen, and Namey, 2012).

To ensure methodological rigor, three strategies were applied: semi-standardized interviews balanced comparability with flexibility to explore emerging themes; data triangulation integrated quantitative and qualitative elements to reinforce validity; and transparent coding procedures adhered to qualitative research standards of credibility, dependability, transferability and confirmability (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

Cross-verification across enterprise types and regions strengthened robustness, while strict adherence to ethical and confidentiality standards further enhanced credibility.

This study’s purposive sample is illustrative rather than representative of all Ukrainian agricultural enterprises. Telephone interviews – necessitated by wartime conditions – limited observation of nonverbal cues. Self-reported data may reflect elements of social desirability, and the sectoral focus on agriculture limits generalization to other industries. Finally, no inferential statistics were applied given the modest sample size relative to the national population (State Statistics Service of Ukraine, 2022).

Despite these limitations, this study provides robust, contextually grounded insights into how Ukrainian agricultural enterprises perceive and enact ESG reporting under systemic uncertainty. The integration of quantitative breadth and qualitative depth yields a nuanced understanding of sustainability practices in crisis conditions.

Our findings are organized into three thematic clusters that consistently emerged across the 53 interviews hidden ESG practices and reporting, barriers to ESG readiness and moral imperatives in wartime. Each cluster reveals a common configuration: Ukrainian agricultural enterprises pursue sustainability in practice, yet much of this activity remains weakly publicly legible to external observers. Section 4.4 synthesizes these results by integrating the descriptive patterns (figures, heatmaps and percentages) with interpretive explanations and by summarizing how practices, barriers and moral logics jointly produce hidden ESG as a practice–visibility mismatch under conditions of institutional fragility and conflict.

This subsection identifies hidden ESG as a practice–visibility configuration: enterprises report substantive ESG-relevant practices (high intensity) while remaining weakly visible in formal, public ESG disclosure (low visibility). We make this identification transparent using a two-step logic aligned with the interview design described in Section 3. We first map visibility – that is, whether sustainability-relevant indicators are measured and through which channels (if any) they are made publicly accessible – and then map practice intensity through reported implementation and integration across specific domains as well as the internal assessment of impacts.

A first finding from the visibility mapping is that many enterprises do not treat what they already measure and submit for compliance purposes as “ESG disclosure,” and they rarely translate such information into publicly accessible communication. This reflects limited familiarity with ESG terminology and a tendency to interpret sustainability reporting as something distinct from routine statistical, environmental or tax submissions.

“ESG indicators are not purposefully measured or published. Most often, the enterprise faces the environmental component due to new legislative requirements in waste management and emissions control.” (Respondent 16, Medium, Center).

“We measure energy efficiency, water use, emissions, and waste handling and submit environmental and tax declarations. However, these indicators are not published.” (Respondent 22, Large, Center).

The descriptive distribution of ESG indicator measurement/disclosure across enterprise sizes is provided in Figure 1, which operationalizes the visibility axis of the hidden ESG configuration.

A second finding is that when sustainability-relevant information is produced, it is typically directed to regulators or transactional counterparties rather than to public audiences. Even where enterprises measure environmental or personnel indicators, respondents commonly described these data as “for reporting” in the narrow compliance sense or for bank lending – not as public-facing ESG communication.

“Consumption of natural and energy resources, emissions, and personnel management—we don’t publish anywhere. We use this data only for state reporting and bank lending.” (Respondent 14, Large, South)

Overall, visibility is constrained by not only whether indicators are measured but also where information circulates: routine reporting channels tend to remain closed to external ESG audiences such as investors, buyers or policy stakeholders. At the same time, low public visibility could simply reflect low sustainability activity. A core finding of this study is that it often does not. To assess this, we next map practice intensity by examining the implementation and integration of specific sustainability practices and whether (and how) enterprises assess their impacts internally. Respondents described these sustainability-relevant practices as embedded in agronomic routines, resource management and community relations – frequently pursued for operational, ecological and local-legitimacy reasons rather than for reporting.

Enterprises most consistently reported sustainability practices with immediate operational relevance – especially social sustainability, resource and input efficiency and pest and disease management – while more formalized governance and climate/biodiversity domains were reported less strongly. The pattern suggests that sustainability is enacted “from the field up” rather than through reporting architectures:

The distribution of practice integration across nine domains and enterprise sizes is summarized in Figure 2, which operationalizes the practice/intensity axis of the hidden ESG configuration.

A further marker of hidden ESG concerns the internal assessment of environmental and economic impacts. Many respondents described monitoring or evaluating sustainability practices for operational decision-making (e.g. yields, soil condition and input use), even where they avoided public ESG disclosure. Respondents also linked assessment capacity to broader constraints and disruptions:

Where enterprises assess impacts, evaluation tools are typically operational and economic (e.g. yield planning, cost-volume-profit logic and monitoring), with limited reliance on external verification. This reinforces the “practice–visibility mismatch”: sustainability performance can be tracked internally while remaining weakly legible externally:

The detailed distribution of impact-assessment approaches is reported in Figure A1 ( Appendix).

The second cluster clarifies why sustainability practice does not readily translate into standardized ESG visibility. Respondents consistently described barriers at the interface between action and disclosure – capacity constraints, uncertainty and low perceived payoff – alongside the practical problem that sustainability data are dispersed across routine reporting streams rather than organized as ESG.

Across the interviews, respondents most often described innovation ambitions in three areas: digital technologies (e.g. drones and sensors), irrigation and resource-efficient regenerative/precision approaches. These directions were typically framed as both sustainability-relevant and productivity-relevant – suggesting that “ESG readiness” is often pursued through operational upgrading rather than formal reporting:

The distribution of preferred sustainable practices across enterprise sizes is summarized in Figure 3.

A central finding is that many enterprises experience ESG readiness primarily as a resource problem: shortages of finance, equipment, skills and technologies. Respondents also described war-related uncertainty as amplifying investment risk and lowering the feasibility of long-term sustainability investments. These pressures help explain why even enterprises that articulate sustainability ambitions often struggle to implement – and to document – those ambitions:

Together, these constraints reinforce hidden ESG dynamics: they reduce the capacity to implement more systematic practices and also reduce the capacity to convert existing practices into publicly legible reporting.

Respondents frequently characterized formal ESG reports as misaligned with local farming realities – either overly polished or too detached from operational constraints. This skepticism is important for hidden ESG because it reduces the perceived legitimacy and usefulness of external reporting formats, even where enterprises engage in substantive practices:

The distribution of perceptions of ESG reporting as “realistic” versus “glossy” is provided in Figure A2 ( Appendix).

When respondents discussed “ideal” reporting formats, a dominant preference was simplicity and low burden – short formats, unified templates and automated digital submission that integrates with existing documents. This preference aligns with the broader mechanism of translation failure: reporting becomes more feasible when it reduces duplication and produces recognizable outputs without requiring a separate reporting infrastructure:

The distribution of preferred reporting formats is provided in Figure A3 ( Appendix).

The third cluster examines how respondents describe sustainability priorities and the perceived appropriateness of disclosure under wartime conditions. Many framed sustainability in terms of duty, solidarity and continuity. In these accounts, heightened practical engagement often coexists with a deprioritization of public reporting.

Respondents’ accounts frequently combined environmental stewardship with social responsibility and community support, including support for employees, landowners and the military. This dual orientation reflects an implicit form of double materiality: enterprises see both how they affect communities and ecosystems and how disruption constrains their capacity to act. Several respondents further linked environmental and social priorities to long-term viability, emphasizing that neglect of these dimensions would ultimately undermine resource sustainability, workforce motivation and future growth:

A detailed distribution of “most important ESG topics and indicators” is provided in Figure A4 ( Appendix).

A recurring finding is that enterprises differ in how they prioritize economic survival, growth and sustainability, with smaller farms often emphasizing immediate continuity and larger enterprises more frequently articulating trade-offs and integration strategies. Respondents framed social and environmental commitments as desirable, but conditional on resource availability and stability:

The distribution of factors shaping future priorities is provided in Figure A5 ( Appendix):

Respondents also contrasted traditional production logics with sustainability-oriented models. Some described sustainability as value-protecting (soil and resilience) or value-creating (certification and market access), while others emphasized predictability and short-term feasibility. This illustrates an emerging but uneven reframing of sustainability as economically relevant:

Finally, respondents were asked whether they feel a moral duty to disclose sustainability efforts absent legal mandates. Many described reporting as low-value or impractical given workload, uncertainty and the primacy of action. Where moral obligation to report was expressed, respondents often framed it in terms of reputation, future generations or investment attractiveness – suggesting that reporting becomes morally meaningful when it is tied to tangible benefits and credible audiences:

The distribution of reasons for (not) feeling a moral obligation to report is provided in Figure A6 ( Appendix).

Section 4 uses descriptive summaries as supporting evidence for an interpretive explanation rather than as stand-alone quantitative results. The descriptive patterns map the practice–visibility configuration: indicator measurement/disclosure and disclosure channels capture public legibility (Figure 1), while domain-level practice integration captures practice intensity (Figure 2). These patterns locate the empirical puzzle – substantive practice alongside weak public legibility – and the interview narratives explain why this translation fails.

Across the three clusters, a single mechanism becomes visible. Practices are often operationally grounded and locally oriented (Section 4.1). Barriers – capacity constraints, fragmentation, uncertainty and skepticism toward reporting formats – suppress the conversion of practice into standardized disclosure (Section 4.2). Moral imperatives under wartime conditions intensify action while often deprioritizing public reporting, stabilizing low visibility as ethically intelligible and practically necessary (Section 4.3). Hidden ESG, therefore, emerges as a practice–visibility mismatch sustained by institutional fragility, constrained resources and wartime priorities: enterprises do sustainability-relevant work and often monitor it internally, yet remain weakly visible in the standardized formats external governance mechanisms increasingly require.

To clarify the paper’s theoretical contribution, this section develops three linked arguments. Section 5.1 theorizes hidden ESG as a legitimacy conversion failure under institutional fragility, where substantive practices remain externally illegible. Section 5.2 positions this mechanism within visibility debates by distinguishing hidden ESG from greenwashing and greenhushing and by framing it as a boundary condition of disclosure-based governance. Section 5.3 extends accounting and organizational change perspectives by conceptualizing hidden ESG as an incomplete institutionalization of sustainability accounting and then draws the ethical and distributive implications of infrastructure-constrained invisibility.

This study contributes to debates on ESG reporting in CEE by theorizing hidden ESG as an infrastructure-mediated practice–visibility decoupling: under conditions of institutional fragility and crisis, the key reporting problem is often not the exaggeration of ESG claims but the failure of substantive sustainability practice to become externally legible. Western ESG and disclosure research has long shown that disclosures can function as instruments of legitimacy management rather than transparent mirrors of performance (Cho et al., 2015; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015; Deegan, 2002). Building on legitimacy theory, we argue that hidden ESG is best understood as a legitimacy conversion failure: organizations may enact sustainability-relevant practices and even sustain local moral legitimacy, yet struggle to secure broader pragmatic and cognitive legitimacy because they cannot translate practice into standardized, verifiable accounts that external audiences recognize (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Suchman, 1995; Deegan, 2019). In Ukraine, this conversion failure is intensified by crisis conditions and institutional fragility – weak support infrastructures, low trust and constrained administrative capacity – which jointly suppress the translation of practice into standardized visibility (Muriel et al., 2025).

In line with Zyznarska-Dworczak’s (2022) emphasis on the risks embedded in ESG reporting, our respondents highlight risk as a central determinant of disclosure – but in Ukraine, this risk is frequently experienced as operational, institutional and security-related rather than purely reputational or market-facing. These conditions help explain why many enterprises perceive sustainability disclosure less as a managerial tool and more as a burdensome and risky external requirement, consistent with accounts of constrained reporting readiness in the region (Krasodomska, 2025). Our findings resonate with Panfilo and Krasodomska (2021) argument about institutional immaturity shaping reporting patterns and with Albu et al.’s (2024) observation that ESG reporting in CEE often serves a formal compliance purpose rather than an internally embedded managerial one. In Ukraine, the wartime context sharpens these dynamics: for many enterprises, resilience and continuity become integral to how sustainability is understood in practice, echoing Kharlamova et al.’s (2025) proposal to extend ESG thinking to include security-related dimensions (S + ESG). Under such conditions, legitimacy dynamics shift: local stakeholders may value continuity, solidarity and duty, while external stakeholders (finance, buyers and regulators) increasingly require standardized ESG evidence. When reporting infrastructures are fragmented or distrusted, the organization’s capacity to “render” practices into externally legible accounts (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975; Suchman, 1995) becomes the bottleneck for legitimacy formation.

Positioning hidden ESG as a practice–visibility configuration also clarifies how the Ukrainian case relates to dominant Western debates. Much scholarship focuses on the risks of greenwashing – high visibility paired with weak performance (Sciortino et al., 2025; Montero-Navarro et al., 2021; Cho et al., 2015; Lyon and Montgomery, 2015). Our results highlight the opposite configuration: enterprises often implement sustainability-relevant practices (e.g. soil stewardship, reduced chemical use and community support, including aid to displaced persons) but remain weakly visible in formal ESG communication. While both greenwashing and hidden ESG involve misalignment between statements and actions, the direction and governance consequences differ. Greenwashing misleads by overstating commitment; hidden ESG obscures genuine efforts, reducing the informational basis for allocating recognition, finance and policy support. This aligns with critiques that ESG can be treated as risk mitigation and formal compliance rather than integral strategic management (D’Ecclesia et al., 2025; Albu et al., 2024), but it additionally foregrounds an under-examined governance risk: reporting systems may inadvertently reward reporting capacity over sustainability performance, particularly in fragile fields.

Our findings also refine the relationship between hidden ESG and greenhushing. Conceptually, hidden ESG resembles greenhushing insofar as both involve reduced public communication. However, the Ukrainian case is better explained as a translation failure than as a primarily strategic decision. In advanced economies, greenhushing is commonly analyzed as reputational caution shaped by polarized ESG politics and contested stakeholder expectations (Hilton, 2025). Related legal scholarship argues that firms may withhold sustainability information to minimize exposure to audits, scandals or litigation (Rasche, 2025). Empirical work likewise shows that firms may remain silent because of fear of greenwashing accusations or limited digital communication capacity (Guercini et al., 2025), while systematic reviews depict greenhushing as an emerging frontier in sustainability communication driven by reputational risk management (Dias et al., 2025). The Ukrainian case shares surface similarities – especially where visibility is perceived as risky – but differs in mechanism emphasis: under-disclosure is sustained by not only reputational caution but also institutional distrust, fragmented reporting infrastructures, misalignment between national systems and EU frameworks and constrained administrative capacity, which make standardized disclosure difficult to produce and risky to publicize.

This mechanism-based distinction has two implications. First, hidden ESG highlights a boundary condition of visibility debates: when reporting infrastructures are weak or mistrusted, invisibility is not simply “silence” but an institutional outcome. Second, it reframes the practice–visibility mismatch as a variant of decoupling. Rather than the classic “talk–action” gap, our evidence points to representation-layer decoupling: practices may be substantive and locally visible while remaining weakly visible in standardized, externally accessible ESG formats (Bromley and Powell, 2012). In other words, sustainability activity may be present, but the institutional supports required to stabilize its public representation are missing, fragile or risky to engage.

The Ukrainian case also speaks to accounting and organizational change theory by showing that sustainability-related change can succeed at the level of practice while failing to institutionalize at the level of accounting routines and reporting infrastructures. Burns and Scapings (2000) institutional framework of management accounting change emphasizes that new rules and routines become durable only when they are enacted, reproduced and taken-for-granted within organizational processes. Our findings suggest that, under crisis and low trust, organizations can develop substantive sustainability routines (e.g. continuity practices, community support and resource stewardship), while the accounting and reporting routines required for standardized ESG visibility remain underdeveloped, contested or deprioritized. From the perspective of radical organizational change, competing institutional pressures and logics can produce partial or uneven transformation – where some organizational layers change, while others lag (Greenwood and Hinings, 1996). Our findings indicate that in Ukraine, wartime and survival logics elevate action and continuity as core sustainability meanings, while external accountability formats are treated as secondary and risky. Hidden ESG, therefore, reveals a distinctive organizational change outcome: changed practices without stabilized accounts - an incomplete institutionalization of sustainability accounting that is not reducible to strategic impression management or reputational maneuvering.

This has ethical implications. Unlike greenwashing, which involves misleading visibility, hidden ESG in the Ukrainian context may reflect under-disclosure as a protective and adaptive response to fragile institutions rather than an intent to deceive. This resonates with Metelytsia et al.’s (2025) insight that quiet, locally grounded sustainability initiatives may reflect forms of authenticity not captured by formal reporting. At the same time, low visibility has distributive consequences. When sustainability recognition and finance increasingly depend on legible ESG evidence, enterprises with professional reporting systems – often large agroholdings – are positioned to capture reputational and financial benefits, while smaller and non-listed enterprises may be misclassified as “non-ESG-ready” despite substantive practices. The central governance challenge is, therefore, to design ESG architectures that preserve incentives for transparency and comparability while avoiding inequities that privilege those who can report over those who act. Conceptually, hidden ESG cautions that “more disclosure” is not a sufficient solution when the institutional prerequisites of credible, low-risk disclosure are absent; practically, it implies that building trusted reporting infrastructures and reducing punitive audit fears may be as important as raising disclosure expectations.

Our findings on hidden ESG reporting have implications for policymakers, regulators and practitioners seeking to strengthen sustainability governance in transition economies such as Ukraine. Consistent with Sciortino et al. (2025), they indicate that without credible verification and trusted governance arrangements, ESG reporting can devolve into formal compliance rather than meaningful accountability. In Ukraine’s agri-food sector, the challenge is compounded by information asymmetry: sustainability-relevant data exist but are fragmented across compliance channels and not easily legible to external stakeholders. Addressing hidden ESG, therefore, requires policy that reduces translation costs from practice to public legibility, rebuilds trust around disclosure and prevents ESG visibility from becoming concentrated among the largest actors.

A first implication concerns reporting system design. Ukrainian enterprises already generate sustainability-relevant data through mandatory submissions to tax authorities, statistical agencies and environmental regulators. Approximately 60%–70% of these indicators correspond to the EU’s Farm Sustainability Data Network (FSDN), yet the information remains fragmented and rarely recognized as ESG. Rather than constructing entirely new disclosure regimes, policymakers should integrate and harmonize existing systems so that data already collected for other purposes can be re-used for national and EU sustainability objectives. A simplified, modular ESG reporting pathway – built from a small set of practice-based indicators and disclosure templates – could reduce duplication and make reporting feasible beyond large agroholdings. This modular approach can also incorporate the resilience and security dimensions emphasized in Kharlamova et al.’s (2025) S + ESG model, which is especially relevant in Ukraine’s current conditions.

A second implication is proportionality. Current ESG standards tend to privilege large enterprises that can afford specialized consultants and formalized reporting, while small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face acute capacity constraints. Regulators should, therefore, establish tiered requirements enabling SMEs to report in simplified formats – for example, through digital templates, cooperative-level reporting support or extensions of existing accounting and management software. The objective is not to lower credibility but to lower translation costs so that substantive practices can become legible in a comparable way.

Third, hidden ESG is not purely technical; it is institutional. Respondents frequently described disclosure as risky, fearing audits, corruption or punitive inspections. Policies aimed at improving reporting, therefore, need to address the underlying trust deficit between enterprises and the state. Practical options include: independent verification mechanisms separated from punitive enforcement, trusted intermediaries (cooperatives, producer associations and universities) to aggregate and validate ESG data and feedback systems returning useful analytics to enterprises.

When firms experience reporting as producing value – benchmarking, access to finance or operational learning – rather than exposure, disclosure is more likely to become collaborative rather than defensive.

Fourth, wartime conditions change both what sustainability means and what is feasible to document. Enterprises often prioritize continuity and community support – aid to displaced persons, support to the military and maintenance of local infrastructure – activities rarely documented in formal ESG terms. Policymakers and international donors should explicitly recognize such wartime practices as legitimate sustainability contributions and develop reporting categories that can capture them without increasing security risks. In reconstruction, ESG integration should be aligned with broader governance reform so sustainability data serve EU accession while also strengthening resilience and recovery.

Finally, addressing hidden ESG requires a more equitable ESG information market. At present, ESG visibility in rankings, credit markets and international forums is concentrated among large agroholdings, while smaller enterprises remain unseen. This asymmetry distorts ethical evaluation and financial opportunity. A more equitable information environment would integrate informal sustainability practices into recognized frameworks, expand access to sustainable finance instruments such as concessional loans, green bonds and carbon credits and enable fairer assessment across enterprises of different sizes and degrees of reporting capacity.

Ultimately, advancing ESG in Ukraine depends on recognizing what enterprises already do – not merely what they say – while creating trusted, proportionate pathways that convert substantive practice into externally legible information.

This paper clarifies hidden ESG in Ukrainian agriculture as a practice–visibility mismatch: enterprises implement sustainability-relevant practices and often track them internally, yet remain weakly visible in standardized, publicly legible ESG disclosure. The core contribution is, therefore, not a general claim that non-disclosure is ethically superior but an explanation of how under-disclosure becomes an institutional outcome under conditions of fragmented infrastructures, constrained capacity and low trust. Our interviews suggest that legitimacy is often earned locally – through relationships with landowners, employees and communities – rather than through externally oriented reports. Yet low visibility can carry material consequences: enterprises may be excluded from recognition within markets, policy frameworks and investment flows that increasingly depend on ESG legibility.

The significance of hidden ESG extends beyond Ukraine as an analytically useful lens for settings where reporting infrastructures and trust conditions constrain disclosure. Similar practice–visibility gaps may arise wherever enterprises operate amid fragmented institutions, constrained resources or fragile trust – whether among smallholder farmers in the Global South, family firms in advanced economies or SMEs in other transition contexts. Ukraine offers a particularly instructive case because the pressures for EU-aligned reporting coexist with acute constraints on reporting capacity and trust.

Future research could extend this agenda in several directions. Comparative studies between Ukrainian and EU agricultural enterprises could clarify how reporting cultures evolve under different institutional logics. Triangulation with stakeholder perspectives – from auditors, investors and policymakers – would illuminate how hidden practices are interpreted, validated or ignored. Longitudinal research, particularly in post-war Ukraine, could trace whether these sustainability practices migrate into formal ESG architectures as institutions stabilize or whether hidden ESG persists as a durable equilibrium shaped by trust and incentives. More broadly, hidden ESG invites scholars and policymakers to treat transparency not as an abstract moral ideal but as a governance outcome that depends on institutional design, incentives and trust.

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Volodymyr Metelytsia acknowledges support from the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, funded by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and private foundations, during his fellowship at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Halle (Saale), Germany.

This  Appendix reports supplementary descriptive distributions referenced in Sections 4.1–4.3. These figures provide additional granularity underlying selected patterns discussed in the main text, but are not necessary to follow the core qualitative argument.