Amidst ongoing global economic and environmental crises, the concept of legitimacy has gained paramount importance for firms, which must not only survive but also maintain their legitimacy through comprehensive disclosures. This study investigates the mediating role of corporate governance in shaping firm performance and voluntary disclosure, emphasizing sustainability implications. Analyzing 82 firms across various sectors in Turkey from 2010 to 2020, the research reveals no direct relationship between corporate governance and equity. However, it identifies a partial mediation effect of corporate governance on the disclosure of general, strategic, and forward-looking financial information related to net profit. Critically, our findings demonstrate that corporate governance fully mediates the relationship between net profit and the disclosure of social and board information, with the magnitude of this indirect effect being complete. This underscores the fact that robust corporate governance enhances transparency in social and environmental reporting, thereby supporting firms in their efforts to align with sustainable business practices and stakeholder expectations. These results highlight the crucial role of effective governance in ensuring comprehensive disclosures that support the sustainability goals of modern enterprises.

This study examines how macroeconomic and firm‐level financial factors shape environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures across different institutional environments. The study utilises 41,060 firm‐year observations from 14 developed and emerging economies covering the period 2015–2024. The analyses combine firm‐level data from Refinitiv Eikon and Datastream with country‐level indicators from the World Bank Database and the World Uncertainty Index. Panel data analyses supported by Driscoll–Kraay robust estimators reveal that firm‐level characteristics, such as market value and debt levels, exert relatively consistent effects on ESG disclosures across countries, whereas the impact of macroeconomic factors varies significantly by country. The findings also indicate that corporate governance and market supervision shape the functioning of ESG disclosures, whilst carbon emissions do not produce similar ESG responses across all institutional environments. By demonstrating that ESG disclosures are a context‐sensitive outcome shaped by both firm‐level and macro‐level conditions, the study contributes to the ESG literature and provides important implications for policymakers, investors, creditors and business managers.