The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:20:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.10 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Sustainability: Scarce Signals From Significant Resolutions – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Sustainability: Scarce Signals From Significant Resolutions https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/04/27/sustainability-scarce-signals-from-significant-resolutions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sustainability-scarce-signals-from-significant-resolutions https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/04/27/sustainability-scarce-signals-from-significant-resolutions/#respond Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:30:28 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=180529?d=20260424143921EDT Posted by Lindsey Stewart, Morningstar, Inc., on Monday, April 27, 2026
Editor's Note:

Lindsey Stewart is the Director of Investment Stewardship Research at Morningstar, Inc. This post is based on his Morningstar report.

Key Observations

  • In 2025, there was a steep drop in the number of shareholder resolutions on sustainability that got significant shareholder support (our definition being at least 30% of independent shareholders).
  • There were only 30 such resolutions in the US in the 2025 proxy year, compared with over 100 in each of the previous five years.
  • These significant resolutions are a useful guide to the sustainability topics institutional investors view as material, so their shrinking number creates an information gap.
  • Despite this, our research is still able to surface some useful trends for investors evaluating asset manager intentionality on environmental, social, and governance topics.
  • Overall, average support for significant resolutions on sustainability remained steady at around 40% for the past three proxy years, down from 54% in 2021.
  • The overall stability in average support for significant resolutions masks continued divergence in voting preferences of US and European asset managers, which has persisted since the 2021 peak.
  • Average support by 20 US asset managers for significant resolutions fell by 11 percentage points to 31% over the past three proxy years. Among 18 European firms, there was only a 3-percentage-point drop to 91% over the same period. US sustainable funds showed a similar stable trend.
  • We see a relationship between firm size and the timing of reductions in support for these proposals. The largest reductions in support by the top 10 US firms by size occurred in the 2024 proxy year. For the next 10 US firms in this study, this happened in 2025.

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