Voting for climate change: Integrating climate issues in corporate governance

Important results from the project

The project aimed to understand how climate aspects can be integrated into corporate governance. The project has achieved the goal of increasing knowledge about the mechanisms through which shareholders can try to influence companies to take greater responsibility for climate change, in this case via the board function. Our results are both useful in themselves and point out important areas for future research.

Expected long term effects

We find that proxy advisors are central for integrating climate issues into corporate governance, and their lack of capacity is a bottleneck. We see that they and their clients are currently "negotiating" new processes and models for corporate governance from a climate perspective. We also show that there is a tension between the need for climate-competent boards and the risk that subject experts cannot participate in the rest of the board´s work. We also see that cooperation between investors with different characteristics can facilitate climate focus within corporate governance.

Approach and implementation

We have followed a pension fund in real time during 2021/2022 regarding its work to prepare and launch new voting tactics for the 2022 AGM season. We have continuously conducted interviews with the fund, as well as interviewed other relevant actors. We have also collected relevant documentation, such as reports and voting statistics. The material has been coded using NVivo and central themes have thus emerged. The analysis has taken place in dialogue with previous research in the area.