Board Expertise Claims and Digital–Environmental Synergy Across European Governance Settings: A Comparative Content Analysis of Legitimation Strategies

Governance innovation is widely assumed to depend on demonstrable board-level competence, yet how firms construct and justify such claims in corporate reporting remains under-examined. This exploratory study examines how selected listed companies assert that their management and supervisory bodies possess expertise in environmental and digital matters and whether this expertise is presented as integrated or separate. Using qualitative content analysis informed by a legitimation-strategy framework, we examine governance disclosures and board-competence matrices in the 2024 reports of twenty companies across Germany, Slovenia, France and Spain. German and Slovenian companies operate two-tier boards and the French and Spanish companies one-tier boards, so board structure coincides with country grouping. Competence claims are coded for attribution, legitimating warrant, connection to governance practice, and digital–environmental integration. Attribution is collective in the sampled two-tier boards and mainly individualised in the sampled one-tier boards. Competence is legitimated predominantly through appeals to authority and is rarely linked to governance practice. Among the companies with verifiable disclosures, none presented digital and environmental competence as an integrated capability. We interpret this as a disclosure-level combinative-capability gap. Companies possess a language for individual competences but lack a disclosure grammar for explaining how these competences are combined.