Earlier this month, the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance published an article by authors from Mayer Brown LLP analyzing ESG and anti-ESG shareholder proposals in the 2026 proxy season. The article frames anti-ESG proposals as merely “critical of” or “question[ing] the value of” ESG policies, rather than explaining the serious legal, financial, and reputational risks raised by these proposals.
To be sure, anti-ESG advocates face a steep climb in securing majority support. According to the article, anti-ESG proposals received an average of just 1.7% support in the 2026 proxy season, and no anti-ESG shareholder proposal has ever passed. But focusing only on that figure obscures an important story in the data, namely, the declining support for ESG.
For the first time in many years, no ESG-related shareholder proposal received majority support during the 2025–2026 proxy season. This continues a broader trend of waning investor enthusiasm for ESG, also reflected in continued outflows from ESG-related funds. At the same time, anti-ESG proposals continue to increase in number, signaling that shareholder concerns over ESG-related risks are not going away. The 1792 Exchange is proud to equip shareholders with data on corporate behavior they can use to encourage companies to get back to business.
Rather than focusing on the decline in support for ESG proposals or explaining the rise of anti-ESG proposals, the authors describe anti-ESG filings as a vehicle for “activist” shareholders to “draw attention to their views and objectives” despite low shareholder support. That framing is misleading. It assumes shareholder proposal vote totals accurately reflect the preferences of shareholders, even though the overwhelming majority of proxy votes are cast by a handful of large institutions. Regardless, retail investors remain largely disengaged from the proxy voting process. According to Broadridge, retail investors voted only 28% of their shares in the 2025 proxy season.
This raises an important question: why minimize the broader decline in ESG support while emphasizing the low vote totals of anti-ESG proposals? One reason is that many mainstream institutions and academics have long treated ESG as a settled framework for corporate governance. Acknowledging its decline would require reexamining assumptions that have shaped corporate policy and academic commentary for years. But the data increasingly suggests that investor support for ESG is weakening, while scrutiny of ESG-related risks is growing.