Clarify Purpose

Position Database

Is your company interested in taking a public position on an ESG issue?

To help companies develop strong, clear positions, we will maintain a public database containing leading positions articulated by large companies globally. 

Our governance guide outlines how companies should articulate their positions, and we have applied this criteria to the positions featured in this database.

Developing Position Statements on Sustainability Issues

There is growing pressure among companies to link social and environmental limits to corporate strategy and goal-setting. However, the result is often a lengthy document that fails to make strategic connections between specific issues and their implications on business decision-making. We developed this guidebook to help you articulate a concise and transparent board level position on key environmental, social, and governance issues. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of over 4,000 board position statements; over 200 interviews with CEOs, directors, and board chairs; and concepts outlined in our series on the Road to Context, this guidebook provides a checklist for crafting a contextual board position statement and includes examples from a range of industries and global settings.

Emerging Trends and Best Practice in Climate Position Statements

Climate change is happening, and the impacts are intensifying. Companies are expected to take a position on climate change and outline an appropriate response. The Embedding Project’s climate position guide helps companies to articulate a concise and transparent board level position on climate change. Drawing on in-depth analyses of over 2,600 climate position statements, this guidebook provides a checklist for crafting a climate position statement with concrete examples from a range of industries and global settings. 

Taking a Credible Position on Nature

There is growing pressure on companies to publicly acknowledge the unprecedented nature loss we face, and what they plan to do to address it. To help them do so, we reviewed over 1,000 statements on nature loss, biodiversity, and ecosystem stewardship from a wide range of geographies and industries, and identified examples of how companies are explaining the issue of nature loss, linking the issue of nature loss to their strategy, and clarifying their commitments to protect and restore nature. We hope this guide is helpful to you in articulating your own credible position statement on protecting and restoring nature.

ISO 37000:2021 Governance of organizations - Guidance

This resource provides guidance on good, purpose-driven governance of organisations. It provides principles and key aspects of practices to support governing persons and groups on how to meet their responsibilities so that the organisations they govern can fulfil their purpose.

Purpose and Stakeholder Governance Playbook: Your Guide to Enhancing Your Board’s Oversight of Purpose and Stakeholders

This guide was created to help senior leaders to better understand the role of corporate boards in governing the transition from a profit purpose to a social purpose, and from shareholder value creation to stakeholder value creation. It provides a set of guidelines that directors, boards, and governance professionals can use to improve board oversight of these transformative practices. The guide is organised into four sections that can help you to create a purpose governance roadmap; create a stakeholder governance roadmap; embed purpose and stakeholder oversight in committee mandates; and better learn about board approaches to purpose and stakeholder governance. Each of these sections features key responsibilities and questions that directors can use to frame engagement on the topic.

The Elephant in the Sustainability Room: Addressing the Tension between Growth and Environmental Goals in Corporate Business Strategies

This paper from BSR can help you understand the tension between economic growth and sustainability. It starts at the macro level, explaining our ecological crisis and its link to the current economic system. It then highlights the need to explore alternative economic systems that are centred on sufficiency and wellbeing rather than growth, and examines how businesses' focus on growth undermines their sustainability targets. Finally, it considers how this tension can be reconciled, emphasising the need for business model innovation, and outlines promising alternatives, such as sufficiency-based, regenerative, circular, and social enterprise models. These insights will be most useful to sustainability practitioners and business leaders - especially those who recognise the need for business transformation but are struggling to align their business activities with long-term sustainability commitments and the planetary boundaries.

The Board’s Role in Sustainability: A new framework for getting directors behind ESG efforts

Although most CEOs now recognise that ESG issues should inform their corporate strategy, corporate boards continue to be a source of friction when it comes to linking corporate purpose to strategy and performance. To address this, Rupert Younger - the director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation and the chair of the Enacting Purpose Initiative - created the SCORE framework. This framework outlines five actions that can help boards to articulate their purpose and embed it within their organisation's value proposition. These actions include Simplifying your purpose and making it straightforward; Connecting to strategy and capital allocation decisions; taking Ownership of purpose; Rewarding executives appropriately by linking compensation with purpose; and Exemplifying purpose in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

PAS 808: Purpose-Driven Organisations: Worldviews, Principles and Behaviours

This guidance document from the BSI Group sets out what it means to be a purpose-driven organisation in practice. This resource outlines the worldviews, principles, and the associated behaviours and activities of a purpose-driven organisation, as well as common terms and definitions related to purpose. This is a good starting point for business leaders, executives, and governance professionals who want to understand what it means to be a purpose-driven organisation, and how such organisations approach decisions-making,