TYPE Original Research PUBLISHED 25 August 2022 DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.890524 OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY Senmao Xia, Coventry University, United Kingdom REVIEWED BY Maria Kovacova, University of Žilina, Slovakia Zdenˇ ek Caha, Institute of Technology and Business, Czechia *CORRESPONDENCE Taewoo Roh troh@sch.ac.kr † These authors have contributed equally to this work and share first authorship SPECIALTY SECTION This article was submitted to Organizational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology RECEIVED 06 March 2022 ACCEPTED 25 July 2022 PUBLISHED 25 August 2022 CITATION Lee SK, Choi G, Roh T, Lee SY and Um D-B (2022) Exploring the impact of environmental, social, and governance on clean development mechanism implementation through an institutional approach. Front. Psychol. 13:890524. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.890524 COPYRIGHT © 2022 Lee, Choi, Roh, Lee and Um. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Exploring the impact of environmental, social, and governance on clean development mechanism implementation through an institutional approach Sue Kyoung Lee 1† , Gayoung Choi 2† , Taewoo Roh 3,4 *, So Young Lee 5 and Dan-Bi Um 6 1 SK Forest, Seoul, South Korea, 2 Green Technology Center, Seoul, South Korea, 3 Global Business School, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, South Korea, 4 Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, College of Business, Seoul, South Korea, 5 E.T.S. de Ingeniería Agronómi, Higher Technical School of Agronomic, Food and Biosystems Engineering, Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, 6 Korea Maritime Institute, Busan, South Korea The study hypothesizes that the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) of the host country have a significant effect on clean development mechanism (CDM) implementation. As CDM incorporates sustainable development as one of the objectives for the green transition, many countries endeavor to adopt and implement CDM as their cleaner production method. Based on the institutional theory, the study aims to investigate the mechanism by which the institutional process of each ESG pillar makes an opportunity for a host country and to see how such country-specific factors influence the implementation of CDM projects. A county-year unbalanced sample drawn from World Bank and multinational CDM project data was analyzed using panel logistic and Poisson regression. Panel regression results show that high-energy intensity and low renewable electricity output as an environmental pillar positively affect CDM implementation. Unemployment and undernourishment as a social pillar positively affect CDM whereas low government effectiveness and the high rule of law positively affect CDM. In the results of zero-inflated Poisson regression, the direction of government effectiveness was upturned. The findings have broadened and deepened the ESG pillar based on the institutional theory and emphasized sustainable development rather than economic outputs. KEYWORDS CDM implementation, CDM projects, ESG, institutional theory, sustainable development Frontiers in Psychology 01 frontiersin.org