The latest insights from the We Mean Business coalition

Joining forces: Leveraging trade associations for policy change that drives business success

Policy engagement, especially indirect policy engagement through intermediaries such as trade associations, is critical to turning corporate transition plans into action. To engage these groups, companies are advised to collaborate with one another on shared policy priorities and overlapping memberships.

As increasing numbers of companies are getting to grips with delivering their corporate transition plans, they are recognizing that policy engagement is a critical enabler – and that failure to engage on policy is a strategic risk.

Across both corporate advocacy activity and corresponding investments, most companies engage indirectly with the policymaking process through intermediaries, such as trade associations. Large companies are often members of hundreds of trade groups, in some cases thousands.

Trade associations are key players in the corporate advocacy landscape – they are often well resourced and carry the cumulative weight of the companies they represent.

For any company looking to engage with public policy and regulation in support of climate goals, it is vital to ensure their trade associations align with their policy agenda and direct advocacy efforts.

While alignment can significantly increase the likelihood of policy breakthroughs, misalignment can stall progress and undermine the integrity of a company’s direct advocacy. There is a strong business case for shifting this dynamic. Persistent misalignment not only delays corporate transition plans; it also prevents companies from shaping the policies that unlock future market opportunities and from capturing the full value of their trade association investments.

At the We Mean Business Coalition and WBCSD, we have been working with companies to help them proactively engage their trade associations so that they are supporting transition plans.

Earlier this year, WBCSD, alongside Volans, released a Playbook for companies to strengthen their engagement with trade associations. The Playbook – built on lessons from collaboration with business, civil society and policy experts – is a practical guide to assessing the alignment and influence of trade associations and engaging effectively to improve advocacy outcomes. This builds off the Responsible Policy Engagement Framework, which We Mean Business Coalition released in 2023.

Through a new joint project, WBCSD and We Mean Business Coalition are supporting companies to put the steps outlined in the Playbook into practice, drawing on additional guidance and tools from the RPE Framework. The project will be focused on the different approaches that companies can take to align trade associations with business and climate goals.

Companies are already taking action in this area. Some have disclosed frameworks to address potential misalignments with their trade associations, including escalation strategies and deadlines for industry associations that do not amend misaligned practices (see, for example, Iberdrola’s detailed framework for tackling misalignments). Other companies have taken the step of leaving misaligned associations – for example, in 2022, Rio Tinto left the state mining lobby group Queensland Resources Council after identifying it as misaligned. Earlier this year, Nestlé and Unilever had disclaimers inserted into European Union omnibus proposals from the European Roundtable on Industry.

However, engaging trade groups to shift their policy positions in support of corporate sustainability goals is a difficult and complex task for any single company to take on alone. We know that businesses are more influential when they join forces, and we have identified two main ways for this to happen:

1. Leading with shared policy priorities 

Companies in a certain sector, or operating in a certain geography, are likely to share policy priorities – whether that’s around renewable energy, clean transport or carbon pricing. Joining forces to engage trade associations around specific policy asks can be a more effective way of creating real pressure than a single company attempting to engage a trade group alone, and can help to even the playing field.

Companies can work together to provide concrete and constructive inputs to their trade groups, translating high-level commitments such as ‘Paris alignment’, ‘net zero by 2050’ or ‘halving emissions by 2030’, into specific policy positions for different markets and sectors. This is critical to ensuring that corporate policy positions are sufficiently granular to provide clear, actionable guidance to trade groups.

2. Leading with common trade groups

Another way to approach collaboration is by identifying where companies have overlapping trade association memberships. In conversations with companies, we know that this can sometimes be a blindspot. While companies might be looking for allies within certain trade associations, they might not have visibility of shared memberships across their full network of associations.

Improving the visibility of overlapping memberships helps companies identify opportunities to collaborate with like-minded peers, thereby increasing the likelihood of engagement leading to a substantive shift in particular associations’ climate policy positions and activities. Effective engagement is about targeting the right associations on the right issues, and coordination with other member companies lends critical weight to this engagement.

Whether approaching engagements from the perspective of policy priorities or via shared trade associations, by joining forces, companies can save time and resources as well as gain increased influence and leverage within their trade groups.

This work is gathering pace. At a recent workshop in London that We Mean Business Coalition co-hosted with Unilever, we brought a group of companies together to discuss ways to enhance coordination and start looking at priority policy areas. There was alignment among companies present around the value of working together to move the needle.

Through our new joint project we look forward to working with leading companies to identify where they share overlapping trade groups, how they can be best engaged, and on which policy opportunities. By collaborating, companies can send a clear and powerful signal to their trade groups and accelerate the policy breakthroughs they need to manage risk, strengthen resilience and drive growth.

There is huge potential to scale this work as companies deliver their climate transition plans and increasingly recognize the value of trade group support in policy engagement. We are excited to be partnering, together with Volans, to drive trade association engagement on climate.

For those looking to learn more or get involved in the work, please reach out to us directly at [email protected] and [email protected].