What was once voluntary is becoming mandatory: the CSRD, the CSDDD and a growing body of related legislation now place sustainability under formal disclosure and scrutiny. Some of these rules are already being used to take companies to court, and because few have yet been tested there, many boards underestimate how exposed they are. The pressure is not only regulatory. Customers are making their views felt directly through their purchasing choices and indirectly through the NGOs that speak for them, while resources businesses have long taken for granted come under strain. The assumption that these are someone else’s problems, to be addressed in the future, has run out of road.

For organisations navigating this reality, the question is rarely whether to engage. It is how to engage well: understanding what is actually happening in the policy landscape before it becomes a regulatory obligation, building stakeholder relationships that are substantive rather than defensive, and catching emerging challenges early enough to address them as strategic questions rather than as crises.

That has been the nature of the work for nearly three decades, across the private sector, international institutions, NGOs and multi-stakeholder processes. Based in Switzerland, working across Europe and internationally.