Reflection 4
In March 2022, Isabella Toole, who is currently working on her thesis, presented her progress at a
seminar. Her research is focused on the relationship between informal care use and socioeconomic
status in Australia. Her research has been conducted using a quantitative method, which is designed
to test a hypothesis. Positivism encourages researchers to see the world through the lens of
quantitative methods, which explain the relationship between variables for example, there is a
relationship between as older person’s socioeconomic status and their informal care use, explained
and measured through quantitatively by Ms. Toole. Similarly, my research objective is to determine
the influence of various factors on the quality of green reporting QGR in the banking industry. Where,
I am also observing the world from the lens of positivism and believes reality in absolute terms that
could be measured quantitatively.
Over recent many years, development activities and technological advancements have caused
different ecological issues. For example, global warming, pollution, non-renewable resources,
techno trash, disrupting ecology, climate change, and other health hazards are among few.
Therefore, concept of green banking has been introduced, where banks make the effort to carry
out their everyday operations as conscientious members of society by taking internal and
external environmental sustainability into consideration and these banks are termed as green
banks (Mir & Bhat 2022).
In today’s era, stakeholders are assumed to be a backbone of the banking industry, which
demand that the banking sectors should introduce and invest in green financing projects,
develop green financial products, disclose their green performance, and green information in
annual reports, and engage with stakeholders (Bukhari, Hashim & Amran 2020a; Bukhari,
Hashim & Amran 2020b; Sahoo & Nayak 2007) for several reasons including raise funding
and investment opportunities, increase banking reputation in the market, enhance overall
market performance, increase bank profits and etcetera. However, Across the world, the
demand from all stakeholders has gone out for providing a clear, transparent, reliable, and
consistent information about non-financial information of green disclosure. Therefore, the
higher the quality of green reporting information, the more significant are the benefits to be
gained by stakeholders,
Therefore, for example, my research work assumes that one of the most important factors that
could influence quality of green reporting is green regulatory guidelines issued by regulatory
authorities of banks. It is argued that regulation and national level regulatory intervention are
likely to improve the quality of green banking reporting. The underlying rationale in this regard
are when regulators enact regulatory guidelines, they monitor whether firms accept the
regulatory compliance or not. Regulated industry in general, abide by regulation to receive
legitimacy, be in the ‘good book’ and to avoid future penalty (XXX). Sometimes compliance
of regulation relating to green banking become part of ongoing performance review of
regulators where regulatory guidelines are used to assess management efficiency (Bose et al,
2018).
Based on above discussions, the annual reports are one of the sources to get disclosure
information on green practices, as previously used in sustainability disclosure literature
…………………….(in this research as green disclosure) to quantitatively measure factors
influencing quality of green reporting