Sovereign ESG Integration: A Bibliometric and Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Investments with sustainable principles that fulfil environmental, social, and governance (ESG) that stress the notion of sovereignty, with varied financing needs and criteria and jurisdictional features, have just lately begun to emerge. We intend to investigate and debate the volume and scope of research performed in that environment. Using PRISMA framework, we obtained 37 articles from 2009 to 2021 related to sovereign aspects of ESG based sustainable investment from the Scopus database. We found that the issues discussed were dominated by Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF), particularly from Norway, which has the world’s largest market value. We emphasize the need for research in developing countries that have SWFs as well as host countries, analyze sovereign investment in the climate-impacted sectors, formulate our own composite index as a common denominator, where the cross-border legal basis for SWF is strengthened.