Abstract
Abstract
The alignment between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activities and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a vital issue of the oil and gas industry, especially in the Global South where resource extraction is accompanied by the abiding poverty, environmental degradation, and lack of governance. This paper reviews policy frameworks, implementation issues, and prospects of aligning ESG practises with SDG realisation in oil producing nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia by conducting a systematic analysis of the secondary data sources, which are academic literature, policy documents, corporate reports and international organisation evaluation.
The study uncovers that there are major disparities between corporate ESG pledges and SDG advancement at the community and national scales, with weak governance frameworks, lack of stakeholder involvement and poor accountability measures compromising the possible synergies amid corporate sustainability efforts and the wider development agendas. The results suggest that there is an underlying implementation gap where global ESG discourse does not translate into local SDG results, where environmental performance indicators are frequently given more priority than the larger social developmental requirements that are paramount in Global South situations.
The paper shows that successful ESG-SDG alignment needs a policy shift, a shift away to more robust regulatory framework, multistakeholder governance, open monitoring and reporting systems, and fair benefit-sharing mechanisms, which focus more on community well-being and environmental protection.
Keywords: ESG, SDGs, Oil and Gas, Policy, Global South, Governance, Sustainability, Regulation, Stakeholder Engagement.