The C-suite burden is shifting

This is article 2 of 4 in The New Age of Sustainability series. Here is article 1.

The highest-rated lever in our 2026 survey of 610 sustainability experts is what governments tax and what they subsidise, at 77%. A challenge that sits with finance ministries and tax authorities – people who have very rarely been part of the sustainability community, and are rarely in the room.

That is the pattern, not the exception. Thirty interventions cleared 50% on impact this year, and twenty-eight of them rose. Almost none of the roles they imply sit inside the sustainability function.

We did not ask this directly. It is an inference, but a tightly constrained one: if you know which levers the field now rates highest, you also have a sense of who typically operates them.

Note: Read the right-hand column. Every one of those numbers went up. The levers gaining ground are the tax system, the purchase contract, the rules banks and insurers work under, and the courts – and the sustainability profession controls none of them.

From fixing firms to redesigning markets

This is the second half of a shift that has been building for over a decade. For forty years the sector focused on the firm: fix the brand, reform the board, redesign the business model, clean up the supply chain, generally one company at a time. Necessary, but never sufficient. A single company that does the right thing is too often punished by a market that pays better for the wrong one.

Markets set the prices, the standards and the defaults. Shift those and you move millions of decisions at once. Interestingly, in this context, cross-sector collaboration as a mechanism rose nine points this year, to 67%.

The live experiments are already running, and few of them were designed exclusively by sustainability teams. One approach is to promise to buy something before it exists, so that it becomes worth building: RE100 pooling its members' demand for clean power, or guaranteed purchase agreements for carbon removal. Norway used tax design, not exhortation, to tip new car sales almost entirely electric. The Netherlands is cutting the nitrogen pollution from its farms through regulation and buyouts, though the farmer pushback has been dramatic at times.

The market being redesigned fastest is China's

China is the clearest-cut example of all, and the one Western sustainability discourse consistently underplays. Early subsidies, rapid scale-up, sharp cost reduction, and control of every step from raw material to finished product. It now refines most of the world's critical minerals – lithium, cobalt, graphite, rare earths – the materials batteries, motors and electronics cannot be built without. That gives it strategic power far beyond manufacturing.

While the West sets targets, China builds the infrastructure. And it has shown itself perfectly willing to weaponise that position, as Iran does with oil and gas and the United States with finance.

A recent GlobeScan survey of 124 sustainability leaders for BSR put Asia-Pacific, China and Japan in three of the top five spots for expected influence over the future sustainability agenda – Asia-Pacific at 62% against the European Union's 51%.

Tomorrow's markets may well be designed in Shenzhen rather than Brussels or Washington, D.C. That is a market-shaping strategy executed at national scale – the context in which future corporate efforts will increasingly be judged.

And from citizenship to politics

If markets are where the leverage is, the political sphere is where market policies get written. Corporate citizenship was soft sustainability: volunteer a commitment, publish a report, sponsor a cause. Alongside the weaponisation of rare earth metals, oil and gas, and finance, the harder version favours those who write the rules and fund the electoral campaigns.

Our experts rate policy and regulatory uncertainty the second-ranked obstacle overall, at 86% negative. They rate business association membership as a lever at 24% – near the bottom of the entire corporate armoury. The channel through which most corporate political activity actually runs is the one the field trusts least.

That gap is where credibility quietly goes to die: climate pledges in the annual report, obstruction outsourced to the trade association. Three questions a board can ask this quarter. What has every association we fund said publicly about policy relevant to our commitments in the past year? Who signs off on our political spending, and does that person own the commitments? And, if our lobbying record were to be published in full tomorrow, what would we find hardest to explain?

The risk in all this

An agenda carried by tax officials, supervisors, procurement leads and litigators can be powerful. But it is also likely to be politically brittle. Nobody votes for it, so it has no public constituency to drive and defend it when the politics turn. In 2026 citizen movements scored 29%, direct action 19%, with 69% of respondents saying moral arguments have lost force.

Clearly, technocratic capture is a potential failure mode for this theory of change. Which raises the question the third article in this series will take up: if the main levers of change are not in easy reach of the sustainability function, what is the sustainability function for?

The third piece in this series asks what will happen to the role of the chief sustainability officer as the shift from soft to hard sustainability builds.

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