ESG as a Strategic Asset in Emerging Markets: A Case Study of Renewable Energy Technology Transfer and Marketing

Abstract

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations are increasingly framed as sources of competitive advantage. Yet evidence remains fragmented on how ESG creates strategic value in emerging markets where institutional uncertainty, stakeholder contestation, and financing constraints shape renewable energy deployment. This review conceptualizes ESG as a strategic resource, an embedded competency that improves project administration, validity, and learning practices, and reviews the role of ESG in renewable energy technology transfer and downstream marketing/commercialization results. By combining findings on resource-based view, institutional theory, stakeholder theory, signaling, and technology transfer, we come up with an explicatory pathway between ESG maturity and partner selection, choice of transfer mode, bankability, absorptive capacity, and lifecycle performance. We also relate the outcome of operations to market-facing processes, as the argument is that ESG influences tender eligibility, cost of capital, ecosystem coordination, and adoption through lower perceived risk and an increase in credibility among regulators, financiers, communities, and buyers. The comparison of a case of China and Germany demonstrates two prevailing ways: an execution-centered way in which ESG builds value by reliability and reduction of disruption, and a verification-centered way in which ESG builds value by safeguards, standards, and credible signaling. At cross-pathways, the strategic usefulness of ESG relies on local fit as well as on how the commitments can be converted into quantifiable results like transfer of skills, development of suppliers, affinity of communities, and reliable energy supply. Managerial and policy implications and a research agenda are concluded at the end of the review in the form of causal identification, longitudinal design, and distributional just transition outcomes in contexts of emerging markets.