The Good Lobby Tracker Launched to Assess Standards for Corporate Political Activities

The RLF came in second out of the twenty-six standards and initiatives.

The Brussels-based non-profit Good Lobby published The Good Lobby Tracker Report in October 2023. The report reviewed a collection of frameworks and standards used by ESG data and ratings providers and sustainability initiatives to evaluate companies’ political engagement activities, with the aim to enhance their transparency, accountability, and usefulness.

Following an assessment of the major initiatives, the Tracker identified over thirty best practices across eight categories, as below, and scored the twenty-six standards and initiatives against these practices. It reported low scores across the different initiatives, indicating that corporate political activities remain an ancillary topic in the corporate sustainability space.

Tracker assessment categories:

The RLF scored the second highest following the UN-PRI Investor Expectations for its requirement of disclosures on political contributions, clarity of the expectation to respect public interest, capturing the corporate governance mechanisms of lobbying and especially, the consideration of intermediary lobbying through trade associations and employees, which is missing in most of the standards assessed. For improvement, based on the Good Lobby Tracker methodology, the RLF can add additional granular expectations to strengthen the Principles. For example, it can consider setting more detailed expectations on disclosure of employee-related policies, ranging from the disclosure of ‘revolving door’ appointments, to dedicated internal lobbying standards and training activities (the Good Lobby Tracker specifically assessed requirements on employees and internal policies). It can also discuss the various forms of political donations and other forms of financial – and in-kind – contributions.

It is relevant to link the uniformly low scores of the standard-setters to companies’ current practices. For example, in the ATNI Spotlight on Lobbying 2022 – Access to Nutrition report that used RLF as the basis to benchmark the world’s 25 largest Food and Beverage companies’ lobbying, the average score achieved was only 21% across all the companies assessed. The mirrored results suggest that for companies’ education and reinforcement of accountability, stakeholders, especially the investor community need to catch up and build meaningful and comprehensive metrics in their standards for companies. As The Good Lobby team claims, the commitment to sustainable lobbying practices is emerging as the new frontier in sustainability reporting, and standards must be adapted accordingly.

Read the full report here.