ESG Shareholder Activism in Proxy Preview 2025

The annual Proxy Preview report was recently released, detailing a selection of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) shareholder resolutions filed thus far in 2025. It also analyzes those resolutions from a left-of-center perspective. As was evident last year, there continues to be a notable backlash against ESG activism, which has manifested itself through resolutions in both quantitative and qualitative ways.

Top Takeaways and Proponents

The Proxy Preview 2025 report is available for download here. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is the precipitous decline in the total number of ESG resolutions, which numbered just 355 as of the report’s mid-February cutoff. This was down from at least 527 at approximately the same point last year. Proxy Preview attributed this “sharp drop” primarily—though not exclusively—to “the change in the presidential administration and what many expected to be a dramatic policy shift” at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It predicted that the number of filings would rebound in 2026.

Another interesting data point was that average shareholder support for ESG resolutions declined from a high of 33.3 percent in 2021—a year that in retrospect may have been a high-water mark for ESG activism—to 19.6 percent in 2024. Proxy Preview attributed this decline to reduced support from large asset managers and to pushback against ESG more generally. As a proportion of all resolutions profiled in the report, “anti-ESG” proposals (a category Proxy Preview previously labeled as “conservative”) saw a significant increase in 2025 compared to 2024, alongside an increase in “corporate political influence” resolutions. Relatively fewer proposals were submitted on “human rights,” “sustainable governance,” and “decent work” compared to last year.

Just 260 shareholder resolutions were individually profiled in this year’s Proxy Preview, due in part to the report’s apparently new policy of declining to list proposals that had already been withdrawn. It explained this opacity by referencing the “unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable” reality “that shareholder proposals, proponents and companies have become part of the culture wars.” After more than 20 years of detailing thousands of left-of-center resolutions often aimed squarely at divisive sociopolitical issues, there is much irony in this statement.

Proxy Preview is published by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit As You Sow and the ESG consulting firm Proxy Impact. As You Sow is probably the most prominent left-of-center shareholder activist nonprofit in the country. In 2023, it reported total revenues of about $5.3 million, down from over $8.5 million in 2022. Some of As You Sow’s largest funders over that two-year period included the Wallace Global Fund ($510,000), the Sunrise Project ($450,000), the Oak Foundation USA ($418,071), and the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation ($280,000). The Ford Foundation has recently become an especially important source of funding, providing a total of $650,000 from 2022 to 2024. In the past, As You Sow received significant sums from the Open Society Foundations, though the most recent reported grant was from 2021.

Proxy Preview listed As You Sow as the proponent of 33 different shareholder resolutions, making it the second-most numerous filer profiled in the report, after the perennially prolific John Chevedden. As of early April, As You Sow’s website listed 58 resolutions on which it “represents investors” in 2025. Other left-of-center proponents with a relatively high number of ESG resolutions profiled in Proxy Preview 2025 include asset managers Green Century Capital Management and Mercy Investment Services, the AFL-CIO labor union federation, the union-aligned Amalgamated Bank (which is itself a publicly traded corporation), the nonprofit ESG activist group the Accountability Board, and the Canada-based Shareholder Association for Research & Education. The most common right-of-center proponents were the National Center for Public Policy Research and the National Legal and Policy Center. Combined, these nine organizations (plus Chevedden) were involved in well over half of all resolutions listed in this year’s Proxy Preview.

Selected Resolutions

Proxy Preview 2025 breaks resolutions down into more than 40 different categories. Amazon was the company with the most resolutions listed in Proxy Preview (nine), followed by Alphabet (Google) with eight. Mondelez International, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola, Meta Platforms, PepsiCo, and Tesla all had at least five resolutions listed. In total, about 150 different corporations had at least one shareholder resolution listed in the report—from the left, the right, or both. Readers should consult Proxy Preview itself for a comprehensive summary, but some illustrative resolutions are worth brief remarks.

As has traditionally been the case, climate change was the single largest category of ESG resolution profiled in Proxy Preview 2025. Many of these asked companies to report on their plans to reduce emissions. For instance, a resolution filed by As You Sow with Constellation Brands asked the company to report how it “intends to reduce its full value chain greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the goals of the Paris Agreement.” Another resolution As You Sow filed with Southern Company asked the utility to “disclose the primary assumptions underpinning its decision to increase reliance on fossil fuel-based energy production rather than renewables.” Additional resolutions dealt with financing and insurance, such as one asking Allstate to report “how it intends to measure, disclose, and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with its underwriting, insurance, and investment activities in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal.”

Proposals related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) continued to be filed, some that were clearly written in response to the recent public retreat from such initiatives at certain companies. Mercy Investment Services submitted a resolution at one such corporation—Ford Motor Company—asking it to prepare a report “describing the research and analysis it undertook before making changes to its DEI policies and practices in Summer 2024.” Resolutions asking companies to conduct “racial equity audits” began being filed in 2021, and a handful were submitted this year. One from the Nathan Cummings Foundation asked PepsiCo to commission a third-party report on how the company could improve “the racial impacts of its policies, practices, products, and services, above and beyond legal and regulatory matters.”

Interestingly, most of the right-of-center shareholder resolutions (categorized as “anti-ESG” in Proxy Preview) listed in the report also focused on DEI. For example, the National Legal and Policy Center submitted a resolution at McDonald’s, asking it “to identify and consider eliminating discriminatory DEI goals from compensation inducements.” The National Center for Public Policy Research submitted a resolution to Goldman Sachs asking it to commission “an independent racial discrimination audit analyzing Goldman’s legal and reputational risks stemming from its race-based initiatives.” Proxy Preview contends that such resolutions “are driven by cultural politics and lack a business rationale.” This is a rather remarkable charge, considering the overtly ideological and/or political nature of so many of the left-of-center resolutions that the report has favorably profiled over the years—including ones pushing the very sort of corporate diversity policies to which these “anti-ESG” resolutions are responding.

Other common proposals requested political contribution and lobbying disclosures. For instance, Trillium Asset Management submitted a resolution at Verizon requesting a detailed annual report on “whether and how Verizon is aligning its lobbying and policy influence activities and positions…with its climate targets and commitments.” Proxy Preview listed numerous resolutions on political contribution disclosures submitted by John Chevedden, such as one at AutoNation requesting a regular public report disclosing all contributions and expenditures made by the company for electoral purposes. As You Sow took issue specifically with Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of an event featuring conservative activist Christopher Rufo as a keynote speaker, with the group referring to him as a “right-wing radical activist.” As You Sow asked the company to report on what As You Sow characterized as “the negative impacts to our brand image, culture, customer base, and shareholder value of associating our brand with politically divisive events that contravene our publicly stated goals and public commitments.”

Playing Politics

For a final illustration of just how thoroughly politicized and utterly disconnected from shareholder value ESG resolutions can be, consider one filed with major defense contractor General Dynamics by the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany, a Catholic religious order which owns just 20 shares of the company’s common stock. Claiming that General Dynamics products and services “may violate the rights to life, liberty, personal security, and privacy” of people during foreign military conflicts, the resolution requests the preparation of a “Human Rights Impact Assessment.” It specifically faults the company for doing business with Saudi Arabia and Israel, claiming that the latter has used General Dynamics munitions “in attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, that may constitute war crimes, and, according to the International Court of Justice, may plausibly amount to genocide.” It also criticizes the company’s nuclear weapons contracts, asserting that such weapons “are prohibited under international law.”

The exasperation in General Dynamics’ response was palpable and entirely warranted. “This is now the third time in four years,” the company wrote, “that the proponent has advanced a substantially identical proposal that seeks to require General Dynamics draft an inflammatory report based on the proponent’s own, idiosyncratic view of human rights.” Such a report “would put the company at odds with its largest and most essential customer, the U.S. government, over core political and national security issues. This is more likely to destroy than create shareholder value.” It ended by noting that “there is, of course, room in our political system for good faith debate as to whether the U.S. government can or should strike a different balance regarding human rights—but that’s for voters, not industry, to sort out.”

This gets at the very heart of ESG activism, which is fundamentally about advancing political priorities outside of the political process. Left-of-center ESG activists are currently on their back foot, which is itself largely a self-inflicted consequence of having pushed things so far in their multi-decade quest to advance an ideological agenda through the American corporate sector. Their activities have provoked a public backlash, and even Proxy Preview acknowledges that ESG is “currently out of political favor.” The report anticipates yet another future reversal—that this backlash will in turn hasten “the pendulum’s inevitable swing back.” Time will tell if that prediction comes to pass.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/esg-shareholder-activism-in-proxy-preview-2025/