The state of stewardship five years after the Exxon showdown

It’s been five years since Exxon’s famous stand-off with its shareholders over decarbonisation.

In June 2021, the oil major suffered a very public defeat at its annual general meeting, when investors voted to replace a number of its board members with alternatives – opposed by Exxon’s management – because they had expertise in the energy transition.

The incident was hailed as proof of the power of shareholder stewardship.

Anne Simson, then managing investment director of CalPERS, called it “a day of reckoning”.

“Investors are no longer standing on the sidelines,” she said at the time.

But the excitement has quietened significantly in the five years since.

Tom Gosling, a professor in practice at the London School of Economics (LSE), spent the first part of 2026 talking to institutional investors about their current capacity to influence climate outcomes.

When it comes to shareholder engagement, he says there was a common sentiment among participants.

“People felt that stewardship could be effective, but that its capability to force change has been overstated,” Gosling tells IPE.

One problem highlighted throughout the discussions, he continues, was “this idea that, through being sufficiently forceful in their voting and engagement, shareholders could just make companies do stuff, regardless of economic viability”.

“That’s simply not true”, he says, and has created tension “between a certain group of asset owners and the companies they invest in, who don’t like being told what to do – either because they think it’s uninformed or not good for their business”.

Some of this tension has been visible during this year’s proxy season, most notably in BP’s controversial decision to block a climate proposal filed by campaign group Follow This.

Faced with these realities, and advances in research about stewardship, many leading pension funds are developing new approaches in 2026.

Railpen, for example, is in the process of publishing a set of plans that “map out a more structured, outcomes-focused and comprehensive path” for its engagement.

“This includes a renewed insistence on ‘following the evidence’ on financial materiality, sharpening and articulating how we have decided to prioritise jurisdictions, sectors and engagement targets, and outlining for the first time our theory of change on systems stewardship,” it said in March.

Elsewhere, a group of French asset owners teamed up with academics and managers to create a framework called Voice this month, which seeks to harmonise the way investors pursue and evaluate stewardship activities.

“There might be engagement fatigue among companies, but the way to deal with that is to standardise the requests, not stop making them,” says Sophie Haas, head of responsible investing at FRR.

The asset owners behind Voice are hoping it will help them sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to their managers’ claims, by creating categories for engagement based on how ambitious and influential it is.

“For example, we make the distinction between disclosure requests, operational requests, and strategic requests,” explains Haas.

While transparency remains important, she notes that asset owners “also very much want to continue to see strategic requests that focus on whether a business is still going to be viable and profitable 20 years down the line”.

For other pension funds, the focus is shifting towards policy.

The Church of England Pensions Board revealed this month that it has increased its policy advocacy efforts, “focusing on issues like the EU CO₂ emissions standards for cars and vans”.

A raft of investors, including Sampension and AkademikerPension, recently wrote to EU lawmakers on the future of the bloc’s carbon price, and many have also weighed in on discussions about deforestation rules for companies in the region.

“There was a period between the Paris COP and the Glasgow COP when most sustainable investors believed the policy response was inevitable – that some countries would go in the wrong direction for periods of time, but eventually everyone would come good on their commitments to the Paris Agreement,” says Richard Roberts, who heads up research for sustainability advisory firm Volans.

“It’s only been in the last couple of years that there’s been a widespread realisation that rational, science-based climate policy isn’t an inevitability.”

Roberts recently hosted six investor roundtables across Europe, Asia and North America, to find out their views on green policy advocacy – the findings of which were published on Tuesday.

“One of the really striking things that came out was that most engagement on policy so far has focused on financial regulation and disclosure requirements,” he says, pointing to frameworks like the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Framework and the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

“But there’s a lot of appetite to shift that focus to engagement for real-economy policies that mitigate systemic risks.”