The work I do
My work sits where sustainability, public policy and stakeholder engagement meet. In practice, that means helping organisations understand what the sustainability agenda actually means for their business, not as a compliance exercise but as a set of real risks and opportunities that will shape their long-term viability, and then developing the strategies, relationships and internal alignment to act on it.
“Communications” understates what this involves. The most consequential work is rarely only about delivering a message. It is about listening to what stakeholders and policymakers are actually saying, helping organisations build positions grounded in what they genuinely do, and sometimes facilitating the internal conversations that are hardest to have, including recommending that an organisation stop doing something currently profitable because the long-term risk has quietly outgrown the short-term gain. That kind of early intervention is the heart of issues management: the real skill is not handling a crisis but preventing one, which means building the internal case for action before the external pressure arrives.
Organisations that navigate this well share a recognisable set of habits. They engage the (policy) debate before positions harden. They build relationships with regulators, investors and civil society grounded in substance rather than positioning. They catch signals early, develop genuinely defensible responses, and treat the risks in their value chain as strategic questions rather than someone else’s problem. The result is not only lower risk but competitive advantage, in a landscape where many are still waiting to see what happens.
For nearly three decades I have worked across sectors and jurisdictions, leading advocacy at European institutional level, running coalition processes at UN summits and managing issues for major multinational companies. This is the terrain where the work is most demanding and the stakes are highest.
At present, much of this thinking is going into a new initiative I am co-developing with partners in Amsterdam, focused on ESG risk, liability and board accountability, where communications expertise, policy knowledge and legal rigour need to work together.
What I bring
Sustainability policy and EU engagement
Engaging European institutions effectively requires more than access. It requires understanding how policy is actually shaped, where the real leverage points are, and how to build relationships that make engagement productive rather than performative. Years of working at that level, most recently establishing GRI as co-developer of the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, managing institutional relationships with EFRAG, the IFRS Foundation, UNDP, UNEP and the OECD, and securing GRI’s inclusion in the UN Financing for Development (FfD4) outcome document, have built the networks and understanding that make this kind of engagement genuinely effective.
Advocacy and coalition building
The most effective advocacy rarely comes from a single voice. It comes from organisations that have done the patient work of building shared positions across industry, civil society and institutional networks, and that can hold those positions credibly under pressure. That has included leading the process that secured GRI’s place in the UN FfD4 outcome document, directing a coalition of twelve international business organisations at Rio+20 that was noted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and managing the WBCSD’s engagement with major multilateral processes over two years.
Issues management
Sustainability-related challenges, whether regulatory, reputational, or arising from the gap between public commitments and organisational practice, rarely arrive without warning. The signals are there early, in regulatory developments, in stakeholder pressure, in what investors are starting to ask. The discipline of issues management is about reading those signals before they become crises, building the internal case for action, and developing responses that are substantive rather than merely strategic. That practice was developed at Dow’s Global Issues Management Expertise Centre and refined across a range of sectors and contexts since.
Strategic engagement and reputation
The sustainability debate has become sophisticated enough that stakeholders, including governments, investors, NGOs and the public, readily distinguish between organisations that understand what they are talking about and those that are managing appearances. Building genuine credibility requires starting with an honest assessment of what an organisation actually does, developing positions that hold up under scrutiny, and engaging audiences in conversations rather than at them. The most effective work in this area has always been collaborative: bringing internal and external perspectives together rather than projecting a predetermined message outward.
How I think about this work
ESG risk is now a legal and financial reality. Issues management is what makes it manageable.
For most of corporate history, sustainability was treated as a reputational concern, something to be handled by a communications team when it surfaced publicly, and otherwise managed at the margins of the business. That framing is now not just inadequate but actively dangerous.
The CSRD and CSDDD have fundamentally changed the accountability landscape. Sustainability practices are now subject to mandatory disclosure, regulatory scrutiny and, increasingly, legal liability. Directors can be held personally accountable for ESG risks they failed to identify, assess, or address. Supply chain obligations mean that this liability does not stop at a company’s own operations: it extends into the value chains of suppliers and counterparties, many of which are mid-market companies that have neither the systems nor the awareness to recognise what is coming.
The gap between what organisations say about sustainability and what they can demonstrably show has become a legal and financial exposure, not just a communications problem. Investors price it. Regulators pursue it. Courts are beginning to adjudicate it.
Issues management is the discipline that closes that gap, not after the fact, but before it becomes a crisis. Done well, it is a systematic process for the early identification of emerging ESG challenges: reading regulatory signals, monitoring stakeholder pressure, assessing what an organisation’s actual practices will look like under scrutiny. That early warning creates options. It allows organisations to address gaps before they become liabilities, develop positions that are genuinely defensible, and sometimes turn a potential risk into a demonstrated commitment that distinguishes them from competitors still waiting to see what happens.
I have spent nearly thirty years developing and applying this kind of issues management practice, first at Dow, where I led the Global Issues Management Expertise Centre, and subsequently for organisations ranging from global food companies to international sustainability institutions. The methodology is not a theoretical framework. It is an operational instrument, built from practice in high-stakes environments where the cost of getting it wrong was concrete and immediate.
Credibility is built through substance, not messaging.
The sustainability debate has become sophisticated enough that stakeholders, including governments, investors, NGOs and the public, can readily distinguish between organisations that understand what they are talking about and those that are managing appearances. Communication strategies built around positioning rather than substance tend to accelerate scrutiny rather than deflect it. The most effective work I have done has always started with an honest assessment of what an organisation actually does, and built outward from there.
Effective advocacy requires understanding the terrain, not just occupying it.
Policy is not made by the loudest voice in the room. It is shaped by organisations that have invested in relationships before the debate becomes urgent, that understand how the legislative process actually works, and that bring something to the table beyond their own interests. The most durable influence I have seen exercised at the European level, including in the development of the CSRD, came from organisations that were present, technically credible and genuinely useful to the people writing the rules.
The right coalition, at the right moment, changes what is possible.
Contested sustainability debates are rarely resolved by single organisations acting alone. The moments when business positions have genuinely shifted policy outcomes, from Rio+20 to the CSRD process and the sustainable finance taxonomy, have involved coordinated, credible voices across sectors and institutions. Building that kind of alignment requires patience, genuine attention to others’ interests, and the ability to hold a coherent position under pressure.