Assessing ESG Implementation in Large-Sized Swedish Companies: Is CSRD a Game-Changer for Sustainability Reporting?

In today’s modern business landscape, systems science thinking on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved through mandatory sustainability reporting, largely influenced by the growing prominence of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations by stakeholders in light of pressing sustainability challenges. Recent developments in the European Union (EU) through the CSRD (2023) and Omnibus proposal (2025) have heightened stakeholder scrutiny and the need for compliance with sustainability regulations, compelling companies to prioritize ESG disclosure practices. In this changing landscape, Social Organizational Life Cycle Assessment (SO-LCA) plays a crucial role inproviding a holistic sustainability framework for understanding ESG organizational performance. Within the EU, Sweden has established itself as a sustainability reporting leader amongst companies. The thesis proposes an ESG analytical framework copmrising of twelve key performance indicators extracted from the ESRS disclosures for assessing corporatesustainability performance in three large-sized Swedish industry sectors of Construction,Energy, and Transport across the six key case companies of Scania, Volvo, Vattenfall, E.ON, Skanska, and Sweco. A Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) is conducted on their 2024 Sustainability Reports. The analysis showcased that the Construction sector was the best performing, followed by the Energy sector, while the Transport sector performed the lowest. The conclusion suggests that CSRD enhanced ESG reporting quantity but not quality, undercoring the interoperability of indicators, with a predominance of Environmental and Governance metrics prioritised by companies. The findings serve as a critical benchmark for informing Swedish stakeholder decisions and developing a holistic analytical framework for the assessment of corporate sustainability implementation, underscoring the need for corporate transparency and enhancing quality in indicator disclosure, filling an important research gap for sustainability science.