Melissa Sawyer, S&C’s Global Head of M&A and Co-Head of the Firm’s Corporate Governance Practice, spoke with Law.com about the decrease of support for environmental, social and governance proposals during the 2023 proxy season.
Although shareholder proposals continued to rise, there was a decline in the number of environmental and social proposals reaching significant levels of voting support. A study by the EY Center for Board Matters found that the number of ESG proposals receiving 50 percent or higher support tumbled from 36 in 2022 to seven this year.
Such proposals “tend to get into territory that investors view as being the purview of management,” said Melissa. “The large institutional investors are loath, without knowing the details of the employee base or the business, to vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on specific targets.”
Read the article here.