Why assurance must be redesigned around trust. White paper published by speeki.
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Scott Lane, Founder & CEO of speeki explores why current sustainability assurance models fail to build stakeholder trust despite increasing rigour, and proposes trust-centred assurance as the solution to the greenwashing paradox.
Sustainability assurance today validates compliance with methodology but fails to build genuine stakeholder trust, as evidenced by rising greenwashing enforcement and persistent investor skepticism despite growing assurance rigour.
Structural Problem of Current Assurance Models
The structural problem is that current assurance models do not incentivize companies to disclose vulnerabilities—challenges and failures alongside achievements—which is essential for credible disclosure. Trust-centred assurance must shift from asking "did you follow the methodology?" to "should stakeholders believe what you're telling them?", making honest disclosure the commercially rational choice rather than a compliance checkbox.
Sustainability assurance is growing in scope, rigour and regulatory mandate. And yet trust in sustainability disclosure is not growing with it. Greenwashing enforcement is rising. Investor scepticism about the decision-usefulness of sustainability reports remains high. More assurance is producing less confidence. This paradox has a structural explanation.
Sustainabilty Assurance and Disclosure
Current sustainability assurance is designed to validate what companies choose to disclose. It is not designed to make broader, more honest disclosure commercially rational. And until that changes, the trust deficit will persist regardless of how rigorous the methodology becomes.
Trust-centered Assurance
This paper draws on two decades of research into how organisations build, lose and rebuild trust to argue that genuine sustainability disclosure requires vulnerability — the willingness to disclose challenges and failures as clearly as achievements. And vulnerability requires protection. Trust-centred assurance is that protection: the architecture that makes honesty the commercially rational choice.
The question assurance must answer is not: did the company follow the methodology? It is: should stakeholders believe what this company is telling them — and why?
The paper sets out four structural shifts that define trust-centred assurance, and maps what sustainability professionals, audit committees and boards must think and do differently to capture the commercial value of genuine disclosure credibility.
Read more about the White Paper here.
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investESG
investESG
