When you’re a company affairs skilled who’s been feeling the ESG backlash, you’re not alone.
New analysis from Trellis information accomplice GlobeScan and the College of Oxford discovered that in Europe and North America, company affairs professionals say pushback towards ESG has change into extra pronounced, with roughly half of respondents reporting elevated resistance towards this agenda up to now 12 months. On the similar time, company affairs professionals in different elements of the world are a lot much less prone to report experiencing extra resistance. This divergence underscores a vital level: though ESG is turning into extra contested, rising resistance to it’s removed from common.
What this implies
Nowhere are the results of rising political and financial pressures extra seen than within the expansive area of ESG. Usually misrepresented as a automobile for ideological agendas, ESG stays an important lens by way of which firms interpret their working atmosphere and form strategic conduct. For company affairs, ESG stays a central, but more and more complicated area. Regional disparities are widening, and political forces are reshaping each strategic priorities and narrative framing. On this shifting panorama, firms might have to undertake extra nuanced, regionally attuned approaches to ESG within the years forward.
Primarily based on the Oxford-GlobeScan World Company Affairs Survey of 245 company affairs practitioners performed February-March 2025.
