Abstract
The research focuses on strategic alliance use in the renewable energy ecosystem and investigates whether alliances are conducive to enhancing a company’s ESG performance. The research utilized the Heckman model, to first examine the relationship between a positive ESG score and a company’s characteristics. Secondly, the model estimated the relationship between the motivations to enter an alliance and the ESG score. The results indicate that companies in the renewable energy ecosystem that enter into alliances motivated by enhancing their environmental legitimacy, reducing operational costs and investment tend to have higher ESG scores. The environmental legitimacy motivation resulted in higher ESG scores, suggesting that this is essential to strengthening ESG scores and that engaging in alliances for this purpose is an effective strategy to achieve this.