Conversation for change
Our engagement programme enables us to hold discussions on themes important to us and to society, such as climate, biodiversity, human rights, labour standards and health. We distinguish between to two forms of engagement: normative and thematic.
Normative commitment
This involves preventing or stopping systemic violation of international standards, such as serious human rights violations, environmental damage or unfair labour practices. These violations not only harm people and nature, but can also pose financial and legal risks. If a company is unwilling to engage in dialogue or shows no improvement, the consequence may be exclusion, in which case the company will be added to our exclusion list.
Thematic engagement
In addition to tackling malpractice, we are also committed to motivating companies to perform better on social issues. We call this thematic engagement, and the themes include:
- improved access to medicines
- climate and biodiversity
- healthy nutrition
- safe and fair working conditions
We either do this alone or together with other institutional investors such as Platform Living Wage Financials, Nature Action 100 and Climate Action 100+.
Our Engagement Guidelines contain both theme- and sector-specific criteria, and are based on international conventions and standards. These are the means by which we ensure that our conversations are concrete, measurable and focused. If conversations do not yield results after several steps, we use an escalation strategy, for example by asking questions at shareholder meetings or submitting or voting on shareholder resolutions. Exclusion may be the ultimate result here too.
Voting: using our influence
In addition to dialogue, we also use our voting rights as shareholders to encourage sustainable change. We vote at shareholder meetings on proposals that affect the strategic direction of a company. Our voting policy (link) is based on international best practices for good corporate governance, such as the OECD guidelines and the principles of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN). We also take into account local legislation and regulations, as well as market standards.
In our voting choices, we focus particularly on our core themes: human rights and labour standards, climate, biodiversity and health. We have an online tool (Vote Disclosure System) to demonstrate how we voted at shareholder meetings.
Transparency on results
We believe it is important to demonstrate how we use our voting rights and engagement programme, and for this purpose, we publish: