Martin Garcia Mortell is Director of European Research and Cian Whelan is an analyst at Glass, Lewis & Co. This post is based on a full paper by Glass Lewis that includes market overviews and company examples for Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain & Iberia, and Switzerland.
Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes Socially Responsible Firms by Alan Ferrell, Hao Liang, and Luc Renneboog (discussed on the Forum here).
Introduction
While the progress of integrating environmental and social (“E&S”) factors into the corporate governance activities and reporting of publicly listed entities faces sudden and significant headwinds in much of the world, the EU is increasingly turning words into action. Partly in response to developments in this area, Glass Lewis have codified our approach to reviewing how boards are overseeing environmental and social issues. For companies listed in a blue-chip index and in instances where we identify material oversight issues, Glass Lewis will review a company’s overall governance practices to identify which directors or board-level committees have been charged with oversight of environmental and/or social issues. Across the EU, we are seeing corporate governance increasingly incorporate the idea of stewardship—that the corporate governance of an issuer should include the governance of environmental and social risks and opportunities. Yet, within this broad trend, issuers are implementing market practice in a wide variety of ways.
