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To achieve sustainable development objectives, managers are encouraged to implement best practices in corporate social and environmental responsibility within their establishments. The main objective of this chapter is to assess the quality of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) communication for Moroccan financial institutions. This chapter is devoted to the content analysis of the annual reports of 14 financial institutions listed in Morocco regarding ESG strategies between 2017 and 2021. The reference assessment tool we used is the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards (2016), based on six principles. Each principle contains requirements and guidance on how to apply it. These principles are summarized in the following: Accuracy, Balance, Clarity, Comparability, Reliability, and Timeliness. The sample is composed of 14 financial institutions listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange. After checking the content of the annual reports of listed Moroccan financial institutions, we detected several shortcomings in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting behavior. Companies avoid disclosing information about negative events and performance. We saw this as a bad sign for stakeholders. The results showed a significant gap between the GRI standards and the content of the annual reports. These weaknesses mainly concern accuracy, comparability, and, timeliness, hence the need to carry out corrective measures to improve the quality of ESG practices within Moroccan financial institutions. One of the limitations of this research is its focus on financial institutions. However, it is possible to broaden the scope of the research by assessing the quality of ESG communication for nonfinancial companies.

This research examines the bidirectional relationship between Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) voluntary disclosure engagement and financial performance of a panel of banks extracted from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) banking industry, covering a period of 11 years (2007–2017). We find that GCC banks, and in particular Islamic banks, voluntarily disclose low level of information related to ESG activities. Using system GMM methodology, we provide evidence that ESG disclosure adversely affects bank performance, regardless of the bank performance measure used. Thus spending on ESG turns out to be costly for GCC banks, a result that is consistent with the agency problem, where managers are likely to reduce long-term expenditures related to ESG actions in order to boost short-term profits. As managers' compensations often relate to short-term financial performance, managers tend to reduce their spending on ESG activities. Furthermore, contrary to previous research, our results indicate that the relationship between ESG and financial performance is bidirectional and dynamic. We also find evidence that ESG disclosure positively affects performance only for well-diversified banks. Finally, although conventional banks disclose significantly more information related to ESG activities, we do not find any significant differences between the two types of banks in the relationship between ESG disclosure and performance. Our suggestion is that these results are consistent with what we call “clientele” and “gravitation” effects, where a customer tends to choose to deal with the bank that reflects his religious beliefs (gravitation effect) and with the bank that provides him with the best services (clientele effect) regardless of its ESG disclosure.

Frame resonance and innovative tactics can substitute for a movement’s lack of important resources to sustain protests. This chapter shows how the insurgent groups in the 2011 Tunisian uprising that lacked mass-based organizations and national leaders maintained and spread the protests using frame resonance and innovative tactics. It argues that the activists’ strategy of frame resonance drew on the collective identity of the poor people in the interior regions, mainly their collective feeling of social marginalization. Activist organizers also relied on a motivational campaign aimed at converting the feelings of injustice held by those in the interior regions into anger against the regime. The innovative tactics of the activists included locating protests inside poor people’s neighborhoods, especially in coastal regions. The engagement of poor people in the protests sustained them in two ways: by spreading and intensifying protests through individual initiatives, and by weakening the Tunisian police in sustained disruptive actions and spontaneous riots. These findings are based on the narratives of 81 activists, insurgent groups’ documents, chanted slogans, and official state documents. The fieldwork research was conducted in Tunisia during the months of April and May 2012, and June 2013.