Target 1.b: Pro-poor policy frameworks
Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
This target concerns the design of public development strategies, which belongs to governments and international institutions. Corporate legal action can nonetheless penalize pro-poor policy. Veolia sued Egypt in 2012 under the France-Egypt investment treaty, seeking 174 million euros in compensation for losses it linked in part to a new minimum wage law. Egypt spent six years defending the claim before the tribunal dismissed it in 2018. Investors also run an annual campaign of lobbying-disclosure resolutions. In 2019, at least 70 investors filed at 33 companies to reveal lobbying spending, trade-association payments and board oversight. Owners can press companies to forswear treaty claims against pro-poor measures and to disclose their lobbying. That lever helps at the margin, while governments still design and adopt the frameworks themselves.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
1 campaign on record
Disclose the company's policies for lobbying, what it spends on lobbying directly and through trade associations and grassroots campaigns, and how management and the board oversee that spending.
With AFSCME
Result: Filed for the 2019 proxy season by a coalition of at least 70 investors. The coalition's memorandum reports the filings and gives no vote results.
we found no documented change
2019 Lobbying Disclosure Resolutions, Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 2019-03-14
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.