Purpose: In spite of an abundance of corporate governance literature across the world, the Botswana corporate sector is lacking. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among the ownership structure, board characteristics and financial performance to determine the role of corporate governance in the performance behavior of companies listed in such an emerging market in Africa as Botswana.Design/methodology/approach: Ordinary least square (OLS) models are applied to Botswana Stock Exchange listed firms over the period 2000‐2007 to determine the role of corporate governance in the performance behavior of companies listed in an emerging market.Findings: The empirical evidence shows distinct nature of corporate governance behavior among alternative performance measures used, in particular, between accounting‐based/hybrid and market‐based measures.Practical implications: Such diversified findings provide the policy‐makers with insights to take appropriate measures on corporate governance and stock market development in order to ensure their efficiency.Originality/value: The approach of this study is different from the other available literature as it captures all types of shareholdings together in addition to other corporate governance and firm‐specific predictable variables.

The existing body of literature with regard to climate‐oriented governance focuses on carbon disclosure and climate change commitments, with a notable omission of an essential aspect of sustainable business practices and decarbonization, that is, environmental innovation. In this study, we examine the effect of climate risk governance on firm‐level environmental innovation. Based on a panel of 4378 firm‐year observations from the nonfinancial S&P 500 components over the period of 2011–2021, we provide novel empirical evidence that corporate climate risk governance is positively associated with environmental innovation. Firms with strong climate risk governance appear to engage more in environment‐friendly innovation to reduce environmental costs and the burden on customers. Further analysis identifies a channel, namely, environmental investment, through which climate risk governance facilitates environmental innovation. Our results remain consistent after we employ an instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching estimates to address potential endogeneity bias. The empirical results also pass a battery of robustness tests with alternative variables and different estimation techniques. This study carries important implications for executive management, regulators, and other stakeholders in relation to reforms in governance structures and the advancement of environmentally sustainable innovation.

This paper examines whether the different corporate governance structures of conventional banks (CBs) and Islamic banks (IBs) have varying effects on their respective climate‐related disclosure (CRD). Employing a unique dataset of CBs and IBs' CRD and corporate governance structures for the period of 2016–2019, we found that their respective corporate governance structures did indeed affect their CRD in different ways. Our findings suggest that CBs disclose more climate‐related information than IBs because IBs focus on Sharia compliance which does not emphasise the protection of the environment, while CBs may be more responsive to shareholders' and stakeholders' demands on climate and environment. These effects were stronger with the quality of governance, that is, CBs disclose more climate‐related information with the governance quality, while IBs disclose even less when their governance quality increases. The findings of this study have important implications for climate change, especially the Paris Accord and The 26th Meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP26). There are also policy implications for sustainable financial markets and the financial services sector.