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The conditions shaping corporate sustainability have not only intensified — they’ve broken in ways few expected. Last year we examined the public posture of 75 multinational companies to determine how political pressure was influencing their climate commitments and sustainability strategies. Using only publicly available information, we analyzed whether companies were progressing, holding steady or retrenching, and to what extent their actions matched the public narrative. (For more detail on the companies examined, see below.)
The result, originally published in Harvard Business Review, pointed to the rise of “greenhushing” as a response to the volatility, where a reduction of public exposure and communication intentionally masks programs that not only remain intact, but are in many cases accelerating.
One year later, intensifying political pushback in the U.S., combined with tightening regulatory expectations in Europe, has created an even more fractured global landscape, raising the question: Will corporate climate ambitions continue to retreat under sustained pressure, or be reshaped by it?
We revisited the same 75 companies to determine how responses are evolving one year later.
Across our findings, commitments appear stable in the aggregate — but beneath the surface those firms have materially adapted their strategies, communication and implementation, often in contradictory ways. This is not a simple story of retreat or progress. The research from this secondary observational period, extending through early 2026, reflects a deeper transformation: companies are no longer responding to a single set of expectations, but to multiple, overlapping markets that do not consistently align.
For sustainability leaders, the challenge is no longer deciding what commitments to make; it’s how to maintain coherence in a system that is no longer inherently coherent.
Three modes of fragmentation
If companies are no longer moving in sync, what is driving that divergence? The data points to three distinct shifts:
Stability is a false signal: Public commitments may appear stable, but comparing strategy across peer groups obscures how rapidly positions are shifting in practice. The direction of travel is a stronger signal; understanding how companies are evolving is more valuable than where they stand at a single point in time.
The global playbook is fragmenting: Companies are adapting to regional policy conditions that increasingly drive strategy in different directions. While tightening European regulation has long driven convergence in global corporate sustainability strategy, its influence today is being challenged by competing political and market forces. Rather than responding to a single regulatory center of gravity, companies are increasingly navigating multiple coexisting systems shaping corporate behavior.
Coherence is breaking down within firms: Commitments, governance, policy engagement and institutional affiliations no longer reliably reinforce one another. The result is a proliferation of mixed signals from individual corporations across markets, functions and stakeholders — and the introduction of visible credibility risks.
These trends point to a structural change in how sustainability strategy is developed and managed. Climate commitments no longer represent a unified, consistent signal; They are shaped by how firms navigate competing pressures across regions, functions and institutional contexts. For sustainability leaders, the challenge is no longer simply to set direction, but to manage tradeoffs across systems where competing pressures cannot always be reconciled. The task is no longer to eliminate uncertainty, but to manage it while continuing to move forward.
How to make progress without a playbook
If the playbook no longer holds, how should companies respond? Here are five shifts in managing sustainability strategy today:
Track movement, not just commitments: Most companies benchmark climate strategy using static commitments — but those are increasingly lagging indicators. What matters now is not where a company stands, but how it is moving. Start by revisiting your core peer group and tracking how governance signals and external engagement have shifted over the past 6-12 months. The advantage comes from understanding movement across fragmented signals, not just measuring it at a point in time.
Don’t try to force global consistency: Many companies still try to apply a single sustainability strategy globally, even where it’s regionally unstable. In practice, political, regulatory and stakeholder pressures are diverging in ways that require fundamentally different approaches by market. Start by identifying where your current strategy is enabled by regional context — and where it breaks down. The difficulty is that most organizations lack a framework for responding to deliberate strategic divergence without creating unintentional misalignment.
Actively manage internal conflict: Climate commitments are often treated as a coordination challenge — but now they function as a source of conflict. Sustainability, policy, legal and communications teams often optimize for competing objectives while working toward the same goal. Start by identifying where these tensions are already surfacing and make them explicit by grounding decisions in the signal from regional teams closest to market realities. The advantage comes from navigating these tradeoffs intentionally rather than letting them play out implicitly.
Leverage institutional complexity: Companies often treat external affiliations as background context rather than strategic inputs. But in a fragmented system, maintaining relationships across organizations with differing positions should be strategic, not a liability. Start by mapping how affiliations shape your exposure across markets, where they enable regional flexibility and where they magnify risk. The advantage comes from proactively managing conflict rather than reducing it.
Redefine coherence to manage contradiction: Most companies still treat coherence as consistency, aligning commitments, governance and external engagement into a single position. But in a fragmented system, contradiction is not always a failure of strategy; it can be a defining feature. Start by identifying where competing signals exist, whether those differences are intentional and where they create an advantage. The ultimate optimization is not eliminating inconsistency but controlling it.
The limits going it alone
Corporate sustainability is no longer defined by ambition, but by constraints. Leaders are not retreating or waiting for clarity; they’re actively managing strategy across conditions they don’t control. The companies that move ahead will be those willing to define new paths within these constraints, rather than waiting for them to resolve.
We hope you’ll join us in exploring these questions with sustainability leaders at Trellis Impact 26, June 23-25 in San Francisco. Kelly will be hosting a roundtable lunch on June 24.
The cohort of 75 multinational companies is composed of the top 25 companies by market capitalization of the S&P 100, Stoxx Europe and Fortune 500 listings as of March 1, 2025. The complete methodology and analysis for the original research and observational window of study can be found here, while the expanded methodology and analysis for the second observation window can be found here.
