The rapid development of ESG concepts and practices has provided opportunities to enhance the resilience and security levels of enterprise supply chains. However, due to the lack of a unified authoritative standard for the current ESG indicator system, there are large differences in the ESG ratings of different organizations for the same enterprise, which makes stakeholders doubt the credibility of the rating results, thus adding a lot of uncertainty to the enhancement of enterprise supply chain resilience.

This paper explores the impact of ESG rating divergence on supply chain resilience using data from China’s A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2022. It is found that ESG rating divergence significantly reduces the level of supply chain resilience, and the findings still hold after a series of endogeneity and robustness tests. Mechanism testing shows that ESG rating divergence impairs supply chain resilience mainly through two paths: increasing supply chain dependence and reducing supply chain financing. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the reduction effect of ESG rating divergence on supply chain resilience is more pronounced among enterprises with larger magnitude of external risk shocks and weaker risk coping capability. Expansiveness analysis shows that divergence in the governance dimension more significantly reduces supply chain resilience; moreover, ESG rating divergence is detrimental to the enhancement of supply chain risk resistance and adaptive recovery capability, but the effect on the adaptive recovery capability has a time lag; at the same time, ESG rating divergence reduces commercial credit financing an enterprise receives when it is a customer, but has no significant effect on the provision of commercial credit supply when it is a supplier.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it overcomes the limitations of existing literature in measuring supply chain resilience. Second, based on the ESG rating divergence perspective, it expands the influencing factors of supply chain resilience while enriching the ESG rating research system. Third, it reveals the mechanism and heterogeneity characteristics of ESG rating divergence affecting supply chain resilience, which helps to form specific policy targets.