CIVICUS discusses corporate accountability with Mansi Kabra, Engagement Lead for Civil Society Organisations at the World Benchmarking Alliance.

For years, sustainability benchmarks scored companies’ climate, nature and social performance separately, obscuring how the three interact. The World Benchmarking Alliance is developing an Integrated Transition Assessment (ITA) that instead asks whether a company has a credible plan to deliver a fair, net-zero, nature-positive transition. Civil society, governments and investors have all fed into its design, and the methodology is due to be finalised later this year, with first results expected in 2028.

Why assess companies’ impact as a whole, rather than one issue at a time?

A company can improve its climate score while making life worse for the people in its supply chain. It might decarbonise by shifting to lower-emissions suppliers, for instance, but squeeze their margins in the process.

For almost a decade, we could see that pattern emerging, but we looked at one thing at a time. We assessed 2,000 of the world’s most influential companies against publicly available information and indicators, scored and ranked them. But we did this through separate benchmarks for climate, digital inclusion, food and agriculture, nature, social and more. The pieces had yet to come together into a single picture. Each was rigorous on its own terms, but they stood parallel to each other. Measuring climate and labour rights apart missed the fact that they are part of the same problem.

The ITA takes that thinking further. It brings climate, nature and social into a single framework, assessing whether companies have a credible and coherent plan to transition across all three dimensions together. It also shifts the emphasis from disclosure to delivery, moving the question beyond ‘has the company published a plan?’ to ‘is the company on track to deliver one?’

This is a significant shift. We are folding all our questions into a single one: does a company’s strategy, governance and actual performance point in the same direction? Answering that requires different indicators, different scoring logic and a much more deliberate approach to what we include or leave out. It isn’t easy, but we’re defining the methodology with civil society groups and partners, precisely so nothing that matters is missed.

What has come up in your consultations with civil society?

The response exceeded our expectations. We reached out to many organisations, but others came forward on their own too, from Bengaluru to Nairobi and Seoul to Sydney, offering a striking depth of input.

Some conversations covered the framework broadly. Others focused almost entirely on one topic, including responsible AI use, carbon credits, grievance mechanisms and living wages. The same handful of problems kept coming up, in detail, showing that people are still grappling with these issues in supply chains and communities.

The accountability gap between commitments and outcomes also came up consistently. Civil society wants frameworks that measure delivery, not just disclosure. Company accountability needs to extend into supply chains, particularly in industries such as garments and food, where the worst harms occur furthest from a brand’s operations. It also needs to account for contexts where the conditions for meaningful stakeholder engagement, such as civic freedoms, genuine channels for worker voice and language accessibility, are not guaranteed.

Finally, the consultation confirmed something we believed but needed to hear: integration matters. Even the organisations that pushed back hardest agreed with the principle. Their pushback was about whether our execution is rigorous enough to honour it. That’s a productive challenge we’re still working through.

What won’t assessments be able to capture?

We’ve had to make choices about what we can credibly assess and what we can’t, and those choices have consequences. Public disclosures alone can’t tell us whether a community genuinely consented to a land decision, whether a grievance was resolved to a worker’s satisfaction or whether a supply chain transition was fair to the farmers it affected. These are among the things that matter most.

The other limit is depth versus coverage. A framework spanning climate, nature and social issues across every sector globally can’t go as deep as an assessment built for a single industry. We made that choice deliberately in our last climate assessment, moving to a core methodology applied consistently across sectors rather than the detailed, sector-specific approaches built for individual industries.

The ITA continues in that spirit. A universal framework enables comparison at scale, but trades off the granular sector expertise a benchmark built specifically for deep-sea mining or garment supply chains would bring. It isn’t trying to replace that specialised work. It sits alongside it, offering a common reference point across 2,000 companies that no sector-specific tool could provide.

There’s also the risk that aggregation obscures what matters. A composite score can hide a company that performs well on climate but poorly on social issues. That’s why we’re designing scorecards to keep all three dimensions visible at once.

In the end, a framework this broad always involves compromise. The real test is whether those compromises are principled, transparent and made in dialogue with the people most affected by what gets left out, including companies, investors, lawyers, trade unionists and civil society. Everyone has a role to play.

What do you hope this framework will achieve?

Right now, the accountability system largely rewards companies that disclose well. A company that publishes a detailed climate plan, even if there is no realistic path to delivering it, looks better than one that has quietly improved conditions for 10,000 supply chain workers without issuing a press release. The ITA is an attempt to reverse that incentive, seeking to make delivery visible and the gap between what companies promise and what they do impossible to hide.

At the most practical level, I hope it gives civil society organisations (CSOs), investors, journalists and policymakers a credible, independent and comparable dataset they can act on. We can’t fine companies or compel disclosures. But we can give CSOs evidence to run accountability campaigns, investors evidence to adjust capital allocation, journalists evidence for their stories and policymakers evidence to design regulation. The ITA will prove its worth if a CSO in Kenya uses it to identify which food company is falling furthest short of its supply chain commitments, and builds a campaign around that. It will prove its worth if an investor in Singapore uses it to ask sharper questions in a stewardship meeting, or if a policymaker in India cites it when designing mandatory human rights due diligence legislation. I want the ITA to bring these voices together and clarify what everyone ultimately wants companies to do.

I also hope the process we’ve been through of seriously consulting civil society and other partners, and building with people rather than for them, becomes a model. Corporate accountability frameworks don’t have to be produced by institutions for everyone else to react to. They can and should be built in conversation, through a neutral process structured around shared interests, and one bound to produce outcomes an adversarial approach wouldn’t. The questions get harder this way, but in our experience, the answers get better.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.