Between scepticism and rigour: Greenwash and UK advertising regulation

This article interrogates the regulatory efficacy of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in addressing greenwashing within the broader framework of climate change litigation (CCL) and private legal regimes. While climate governance literature often eschews direct engagement with capitalism’s structurally extractive relationship to ecological degradation, regulatory strategies such as stranded asset discourse and corporate disclosure mechanisms exemplify efforts to reform from within. The ASA, a paradigmatic instance of an autonomous private legal regime, is examined as a site of regulatory innovation in the environmental advertising domain. Contrary to prevailing scepticism regarding the legitimacy and accountability of private regulators, the ASA demonstrates high epistemic competence, procedural robustness, and output legitimacy in adjudicating complex environmental claims. In this it deploys AI monitoring tools which although effective, do lack transparency in their usage. Similarly, although the ASA is found to be a highly effective regulator, even successful claimants can be involved in ‘whack-a-mole’ scenarios to shut down parallel online imprints. The paper further theorizes the proliferation of greenwashing typologies—greenlighting, greencrowding, greenshifting, greenclaiming, greenrinsing, and greenhushing—as indicative of a broader discursive and normative expansion akin to adjectival constitutionalism. While the ASA’s model offers a compelling case of regulatory success within a domestic context, the article cautions against uncritical transposition of its logic to other jurisdictions or climate governance arenas.