"Where Angels Fear to Tread: How to Make Global Business Responsible", 19 July 2021

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[...] [I]t would be a mistake not to acknowledge the profound shifts over the last 30 years in attitudes toward and within corporations as to what capitalism is expected to deliver. Environmental sensibilities are no longer corporate externalities but core business concerns, and while social and human rights concerns are not yet quite so ensconced, they are beating the same path through board room doors.[...].

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[...] The finance sector has long been a holdout in terms of understanding or even acknowledging its social and environmental responsibilities, and yet it is from the ranks of major investors, asset holders and wealth managers that calls for ESG consciousness are loudest (Kinley, 2021).

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[...] BlackRock’s latest statement on human rights also hammers home the point that human rights risks are not ephemeral but core – that is to say ‘material’ – to all corporations today and therefore cannot be ignored. [...]

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It is, in truth, still too soon to say whether all these promising signs will deliver significant and long-lasting change to the role of corporations in our societies. They are, after all, silver linings still surrounded by dark clouds. Both the finance and extractive sectors, for example, managed to exempt themselves from the global tax redistribution deal under Pillar 1 mentioned above, despite comprising some of the wealthiest and most profitable enterprises on Earth. Damascene conversion to the environmental cause is by no means universal. Oil behemoth Exxon, backed by its major institutional investors, for instance, have steadfastly resisted for more than 30 years numerous efforts by minority shareholders to change the company’s climate change-denying corporate policies. [...]

[...] The trends discussed in this brief article may not themselves be sufficient in that monumental task, but they are, at least, pointing in the right direction.