Strategies for legitimizing negative events: Mining dam collapse and disclosure

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the legitimation strategies used in environmental disclosure to neutralize negative events, such as environmental accidents, and to help identify and conceptualize the legitimation strategies related to negative events and environmental accidents used in sustainability reports. The article questions the reliability of sustainability reports produced by a benchmark company in a polluting and impact-generating sector, finding that they can be strategically manipulated to serve the interests of legitimizing and repairing the company’s image rather than providing clear and objective information. The article examines the image repair mechanisms used by Samarco Mineração in its sustainability reports following the Mariana environmental disaster, with the aim of legitimizing one of the largest mining companies in the country at the time of the accident, the consequences of which are still being felt years after its occurrence. The research adopted the interpretivist paradigm, with a qualitative approach and textual content analysis of sustainability reports and reports from the relevant government agency, using the documentary research technique. It was found that the environmental disclosure published in sustainability reports is rhetorically manipulated with a massive amount of positive information, which overshadows and diverts the reader’s attention from negative information and neutralizes it with defensive and mitigating arguments, thus showing that its content is not committed to the impartial disclosure of information.