Leveraging your trade association membership to maximize corporate value: a new Playbook for companies
Dominic Gogol, We Mean Business Coalition & Elisa Leimer, WBCSD
As companies move from setting sustainability goals to delivering on them, one thing has become increasingly clear: success doesn’t depend on internal action alone. Achieving climate, nature and social equity targets requires external conditions to shift – most importantly, the policy and regulatory environments in which businesses operate.
Policy engagement has become a strategic imperative for leading companies. This is why both WBCSD and We Mean Business Coalition are focused on supporting companies in leveraging their corporate influence to advance climate policy. At WBCSD, we do this through our Positive Policy Engagement Advisory Group and for the Coalition, we encourage companies to leverage our Responsible Policy Engagement Framework.
Across the companies we work with – whether they are decarbonizing power grids, scaling green steel or building resilient supply chains – we see that corporate action hinges on supportive public policy. In many cases, the absence of enabling policy has become a bottleneck, stalling progress and amplifying risks.
This isn’t about politics – it’s about creating the conditions in which sustainable business strategies can succeed, growing the market for clean products and services.
While many companies are engaged in direct advocacy, a majority of corporate political engagement is conducted indirectly by trade associations.
Trade associations play a number of roles (from acting as technical standard setting bodies to hosting sectoral dialogues) and are some of the most powerful actors in shaping national policies agreed by governments. Because they aggregate the voices of their members and sometimes entire industries, policymakers listen. In some jurisdictions and sectors, trade associations are viewed as the unchallenged voice of business.
But this influence is a double-edged sword. While associations can amplify and accelerate their leading corporate members’ policy agenda, misaligned ones can undermine it, diluting ambition, delaying legislation and exposing companies to reputational and regulatory risk.
To help companies navigate and optimize this space, WBCSD and Volans have released Mobilising Trade Associations as a Force for Good: A Playbook for Companies. It’s a practical guide to strengthening how companies manage and engage with trade associations, built on lessons from more than a year of collaboration with business, civil society and policy experts.
The Playbook offers a step-by-step approach to:
- Align internal strategy with policy engagement goals
- Communicate actionable, science-aligned policy priorities
- Assess the alignment and influence of trade associations
- Engage effectively to improve advocacy outcomes
- Make informed membership decisions
Assessing your trade associations’ positions and identifying potential misalignments is becoming a much more common practice among leading corporates. You’ll find within the Playbook examples from leading companies like Unilever and Iberdrola.
But for those who haven’t yet gotten started, the Playbook equips sustainability and corporate affairs teams with the tools they need to bring consistency, credibility and ambition to this important work.
Putting it into practice
The focus now turns to implementation. WBCSD and Volans will be supporting companies to put the Playbook’s guidance into practice, starting with a targeted campaign to mobilize trade associations in support of the global goals to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency by 2030, as agreed at COP28.
Through tailored tools, peer collaboration and structured engagement based on the Playbook’s five-step framework, this activation effort aims to turn trade associations into proactive champions of the policies needed to deliver corporate sustainability goals. If your company would like to get involved, please reach out to Elisa ([email protected]) or Cami Daeninck from the Volans team ([email protected]).
Additional corporate advocacy resources on the horizon
RPE Framework Refresh
Meanwhile, We Mean Business Coalition and our partners are continuously expanding the resources and tools available to companies to elevate their corporate advocacy. We will be releasing a refreshed iteration of our Responsible Policy Engagement Framework later this year. First launched in 2023 with the full support of all Coalition founding partners and SBTi, Race to Zero and InfluenceMap, the framework continues to provide foundational guidance for companies looking to align their policy influence with climate action. We’re excited to be updating this resource to reflect the various new tools that have been released over the past two years years.
Raising Standards for Corporate Policy Engagement
We Mean Business Coalition and our partners are finalizing ‘Corporate Advocacy in the UNFCCC process – Business Call for Accountability’ ahead of the UNFCCC Bonn Intersessional meetings in late June. This tool will promote greater transparency and higher lobbying standards at the Climate COPs. Our goal is to strengthen the policy engagement standards to which companies are held as a prerequisite for participating in the UNFCCC processes – including by encouraging more companies to report their climate advocacy. If your group is interested in supporting this effort, please reach out to [email protected] .
Platforming Corporate Policy Engagement at London Climate Action Week
We Mean Business Coalition, WBCSD and our partners are hosting several Responsible Policy Engagement events at London Climate Action Week in June, providing excellent opportunities for companies looking to elevate their policy engagement. If you are attending LCAW and interested in learning more about these events, please reach out to us directly ([email protected] or [email protected]).