22/05/2025
Written by Dieter Zinnbauer
Imagine you are a devoted parent and join a club that is promoting kid’s education. You pay membership fees, perhaps even sit on the board and then this club’s executive team starts lobbying to cut funding for improving schools.
Imagine you are a company laser-focused on managing material risks of all kinds to your business, vetting all your suppliers and business partners to ensure that they do what you expect them to do and do not cause any reputational trouble. But then you end up paying membership dues and lending your good name to a collective initiative that starts advocating in public for the very things that you do not wish to be associated with and that are opposed to your stated purposes and business values.
Sounds both untenable and far-fetched?
Yet it is the reality that many companies face with regard to their membership in business associations that often go rogue and lobby for policies diametrically opposed to many of their members aims and values.
And the consequences are drastic: business associations play an outsize role in lobbing and PR work thus often influencing critical policy agendas – on climate, on public health, on technology – in ways that are counterproductive both to the public interest and the interests of many of their members.
The Financial Times just highlighted this great disconnect in an insightful piece here.
So what to do about it?
The Good Lobby and many of our friends are hard at work on many different aspects of the solution matrix. InfluenceMap, for example excels in identifying and mapping these disconnects for a growing range of policy domains. Volans is actively engaging with individual companies to help them review and align their membership in business associations. And we proudly contribute on three levels to these efforts one of them also profiled in the Financial Times piece:
- The Good Lobby Tracker is the first assessment of leading sustainability data providers with regard to their inclusion of corporate political activity, including via business associations in their screens and corporate responsibility assessments. The Tracker generates peer pressure and visibility for such data blind spots that investors have long flagged as critical for helping them work more effectively with their portfolio companies at scale on addressing such material lobbying misalignments.
- The Good Lobby REBASE project maps internal governance and external regulatory practices for business associations that support more responsible and accountable political conduct and that can thus also expand the spectrum of engagement options for member companies that seek to work toward internal reforms.
- Last not least, The Good Lobby DECARB initiative puts the spotlight on professional lobby firms and their role or failure in making corporate influencing more responsible. It provides a first full-picture mapping of how public affairs firms work with fossil fuel clients at European level to highlight opportunities for more public scrutiny and divestment.
So as overwhelming and unfixable as the great misalignment between corporate values and collective lobbying might look at the outset, breaking it down into the many pathways and levers for change provides for a hopeful roadmap to turn a “not in my name” from slogan into effective reality. Let’s get on with it!