How stewardship has evolved across the asset management industry and what it means for every link in the capital chain.
Stewardship has become one of the most visible expressions of responsible investment, yet one of the most unevenly evidenced. Climate change, biodiversity loss, labour standards, and governance failures are now recognised as systemic risks that shape portfolio outcomes across entire markets and time horizons. They cannot be diversified away, nor addressed through disclosure alone.
This paper draws on 126 stewardship reports across 40 firms published between 2020 and 2025. The pattern it reveals is consistent: a small group invested seriously in people, systems, and governance. Much of the market has not.
When we started building Maanch, the problem was hiding in plain sight. Stewardship reports existed, but the intelligence inside them was trapped, unstructured, incomparable, inaccessible. Asset owners couldn't track how their managers were stewarding on their behalf. Consultants spent hundreds of hours reading reports to answer questions that structured data could answer in minutes. Managers reported on stewardship retrospectively, rather than proactively. In ongoing consultation with the industry, Maanch continues to build and evolve the measurement infrastructure that makes stewardship quantifiable across the entire investment chain.
Stewardship must now be treated as fiduciary infrastructure: designed to support oversight, evidence, and defensibility, rather than as a collection of activities or a reporting obligation.
This paper draws on publicly available UK Stewardship Code reports, analysed using AI-assisted interpretation. It reflects what firms have reported in their own published reports, which have not been independently verified. Maanch Limited, the authors and contributors, make no representation as to the completeness or accuracy of third-party disclosures.
Charts, tiers, and capability descriptions are illustrative. They do not constitute ratings, rankings, or formal assessments of stewardship quality or performance, and should not be relied upon as such.
Nothing in this paper constitutes ESG ratings, investment, legal, or other professional advice. Nothing should be construed as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, or to appoint, retain, or terminate any asset manager. Independent professional advice should be sought before making investment, procurement, or governance decisions.
Darshita founded Maanch to bridge the gap between stewardship data and stewardship action. She works with asset owners, managers, and consultants across the UK and international stewardship landscape.
LinkedIn →Susie brings deep expertise in stewardship policy, institutional investment, and responsible finance. She led the research and drafting of this paper, drawing on five years of published stewardship reports.
LinkedIn →Junming led the AI-assisted extraction and structuring of 126 stewardship reports, building the analytical dataset that underpins this paper’s findings.
LinkedIn →Oliver contributed research and editorial input across the themes of governance, voting, and client communication, drawing on his background in institutional investment and stewardship practice.
LinkedIn →Between 2020 and 2025, stewardship practice underwent a clear and measurable evolution. ESG integration began to give way to systemic risk management. Climate-only approaches expanded to include biodiversity and social factors. Annual, reactive engagement was increasingly replaced by multi-year thematic campaigns. Voting shifted from a compliance exercise toward a deliberate escalation tool.
However, this evolution has been uneven. A small group of organisations invested significantly in people, systems, and governance, developing outcome-focused approaches capable of withstanding scrutiny. Much of the market remains reliant on fragmented reporting, third-party data, and retrospective narratives.
The research shows a widening gap between stewardship that is procedurally compliant and stewardship that is substantively effective. Asset owners who continue to rely on legacy models face increasing difficulty defending their approach.
The table below maps where the industry started in 2020–21 and where leaders now operate across each of the five themes this paper explores.
| Theme | 2020–2021 Starting point |
2024–2025 Where leaders operate now |
|---|---|---|
| A · Stakes & Scope | ESG factors, compliance framing, limited board involvement | Stewardship as board-level fiduciary governance with independent oversight |
| B · Activity → Outcomes | Annual engagement letters; activity counts; no outcome tracking | Documented outcome chains; investment decisions linked to engagement evidence |
| C · Voting & Escalation | Blanket voting policies; compliance-driven; no escalation logic | Voting as strategic signal; documented escalation paths; public rationale disclosure |
| D · People & Governance | Small ESG generalist teams; informal conflicts management | Specialist teams; independent conflicts oversight; stewardship embedded in investment process |
| E · Data & Clients | Equity-only scope; third-party data dependency; passive client reporting | Multi-asset stewardship; proxy voting choice; climate-nature integration; real-time client reporting |
How to read this paper: Each of the five themes (A–E) maps to a row in this table. The analysis in each section draws directly on the 126 stewardship reports in the dataset, showing where the evidence confirms this evolution, where it stalls, and where the gap between stated intent and actual practice is widest.
Stewardship has shifted from an operational function to a matter of board oversight. While execution remains delegated, accountability sits with asset owners. Governance structures between 2020 and 2025 evolved accordingly, drawing boards and trustees directly into stewardship oversight.
In the early 2020s, stewardship oversight was often confined to ESG or responsible investment teams, with limited board involvement. Between 2022 and 2024, this changed materially. State Street established an ESG Committee with responsibility for stewardship philosophy, voting, and engagement oversight. LGIM formalised board-level oversight through investment stewardship committees, often chaired by independent non-executive directors.
Under the UK Stewardship Code 2020, oversight is explicit. Boards are no longer expected merely to approve policies, but to understand how stewardship decisions are made and escalated.
Between 2020 and 2025, stewardship moved from being framed primarily as an extension of ESG integration toward being understood as a mechanism for managing systemic risk. This shift is visible in how investment beliefs and stewardship objectives were reformulated, particularly among more advanced asset owners.
Aviva UK Life's 2021 stewardship reporting positioned climate risk in relation to the UK Prudential Regulation Authority's SS3/19 requirements, a compliance orientation. By 2023, Railpen had reformulated its investment beliefs to recognise that a long investment horizon exposes a pension scheme to societal and systemic risks such as climate change. This reframing moved ESG issues into the core of fiduciary thinking.
Key implication: Systemic risks cannot be diversified away, delegated entirely, or addressed through disclosure alone. They accumulate across portfolios and time horizons, directly affecting beneficiaries with long-dated liabilities.
Stewardship agendas between 2020 and 2022 were dominated by climate change. From 2023 onwards, leading firms began integrating biodiversity and nature, reflecting a more mature understanding of interconnected environmental risk. Robeco's engagement history illustrates this: its Climate Action programme ran from Q1 2018 to Q1 2021, and its Net-Zero Carbon Emissions programme from Q4 2020 to Q4 2023. From 2023, Robeco finalised its Biodiversity Investment Framework and became a founding signatory of Nature Action 100.
Based on disclosure analysis across 126 stewardship reports. Figures represent proportion of firms addressing each theme in their published reports.
By 2024, many firms were actively preparing for the updated UK Stewardship Code, which takes a clearer outcomes focus and introduces a more flexible reporting structure. References to the update shifted from generic acknowledgements to concrete governance and process changes.
The Code sets high stewardship standards for those investing money on behalf of UK savers and pensioners, and those that support them. Reports must link to organisational governance and policies.
UK Stewardship Code 2026, Financial Reporting CouncilThe grid below shows where industry-level disclosure is strongest and where persistent gaps remain across the 12 Principles, based on analysis of 126 reports. The labels reflect the breadth and consistency of disclosed evidence, not a rating of any individual firm.
Industry-level disclosure patterns across the 12 UK Stewardship Code Principles, based on analysis of 126 published reports (Maanch, 2025). Labels reflect breadth of disclosure observed, not an assessment of any individual firm.
126 reports. 40 firms. All structured against the 12 Principles, without reading a single PDF.
Stewardship Signal structures and makes searchable the public disclosures of UK Stewardship Code signatories, mapped to the 12 Principles. What used to take an analyst days to read, compare, and compile is now queryable in minutes, with source citations back to the original published report. It is a disclosure transparency tool: it presents what firms have stated, so users can draw their own conclusions.
Explore Stewardship Signal →Early stewardship relied on annual, reactive engagement. Between 2022 and 2025, leading firms shifted toward multi-year thematic campaigns with defined objectives and milestones, enabling sustained influence over company behaviour rather than point-in-time dialogue.
Illustrative distribution based on disclosure patterns observed across 126 published reports.
State Street's 2024 reporting describes stewardship initiatives that typically span multiple years: "We prioritise our stewardship efforts through key stewardship initiatives, each addressing significant ESG factors affecting our clients' holdings." Robeco's thematic engagements routinely ran for two to four years, enabling progress to be assessed over time.
Between 2021 and 2022, stewardship engagement focused heavily on improving corporate disclosure. From 2023 onwards, leading firms pivoted toward outcome measurement, explicitly linking stewardship activity to observable change in company behaviour and real-economy impact.
Impax took this shift further in its 2024 UK Stewardship Code statement by introducing a "stewardship impact value chain." The framework articulates how stewardship inputs (dedicated resources and governance structures) and actions (research, collaboration, escalation) are intended to lead to defined outcomes and real-economy impact.
Reflects depth of outcome-related disclosure observed in published reports; "Leaders", "Mid-Pack", and "Laggards" are descriptive groupings based on disclosed characteristics, not assigned ratings.
Key development: The industry moved from asking "did the company disclose?" to "what real-world change occurred?", but most asset owners still lack the infrastructure to answer the latter question with rigour and consistency.
Net-zero commitments provide a clear illustration of how stewardship has moved from headline pledges toward implementation, and how progress is now being tested by political backlash and shifting alliances. The trajectory can be understood in three phases.
In 2024, the US House Judiciary Committee wrote to 60+ NZAM signatories. BlackRock withdrew; NZAM suspended operations. Yet BlackRock's sustainability-linked assets reached ~USD 1 trillion by end of 2024, roughly doubling since 2021. Climate stewardship was reconfigured, not abandoned.
Asset-owner implication: Net-zero stewardship now sits squarely within the realm of fiduciary infrastructure. Boards must look beyond initiative memberships to assess whether managers have robust plans, credible escalation tools, and defensible implementation pathways.
The outcome gap is visible in the data, if you know where to look.
Stewardship Signal structures and makes searchable the engagement disclosures published by UK Stewardship Code signatories. Asset owners and consultants can search by engagement theme, view what outcomes firms have reported, and compare depth of disclosure across the signatory base, drawing directly on what each firm has stated in their own published reports.
Explore the platform →Between 2020 and 2022, proxy voting at many firms remained primarily policy-driven, with decisions framed through pre-defined guidelines rather than clearly documented links to engagement outcomes. From 2023 onwards, leading firms began articulating voting more explicitly as an escalation mechanism.
Aggregate statistics and alignment with house policy. Voting against management framed as exception, justified by predefined thresholds.
Railpen introduces new thematic voting lines. Voting begins acknowledging the limitations of purely rules-based approaches. Engagement and voting narratives start connecting.
State Street votes against Compensation Committee Chair following governance shortcomings. Votes in director elections explicitly described as more effective than shareholder resolutions.
Visible escalation logic: engagement → voting → capital decisions. Time-based triggers, documented rationales, demonstrable connection to fiduciary strategy.
State Street's 2024 policy evolution abandoned numerical limits for director overboarding in favour of voting against the chair of the nominating and governance committee at S&P 500 companies that fail to disclose their internal policy on director time commitments: "Making subjective decisions to determine the calibre and time commitment of individual directors should be the job of well-governed boards themselves, not asset managers."
Systemic risks drove a shift toward collaborative engagement. Robeco expanded collaborative initiatives across multiple themes. Railpen led authorship of an International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) viewpoint on systemic stewardship. These are not simply examples of industry participation; they represent a deliberate strategic shift toward collective leverage as a primary engagement tool.
The Exxon-Arjuna case provides the clearest illustration of modern collaborative escalation: coordinated action combining public statements, voting escalation, direct engagement, and public commentary from 38 global investors representing USD 5.2 trillion in assets.
38 global investors representing USD 5.2 trillion signed public statement criticising ExxonMobil's actions
Net zero voting policy implemented throughout engagement, with post-proxy letters to Executive Chair
Engaged Company Secretary, Chief of Staff to Larry Fink, Investor Relations, and Global Head of Investment Stewardship
Published blog post setting out position on shareholder rights, with follow-up letter to BlackRock on climate commitments
The presence of an escalation policy is no longer sufficient. Asset owners increasingly need to understand who oversees escalation decisions, how independent that oversight is, and what triggers the move from engagement to more forceful tools, including voting against management, filing resolutions, public statements, or ultimately capital reallocation.
ShareAction's benchmarking of 76 asset managers found that only 10 achieved more than half of their key stewardship standards, and that European managers, including Robeco and APG, dominate the top rankings. The research highlights persistent gaps in fossil fuel escalation follow-through, consistent with the patterns observed in the underlying stewardship reports: engagement activity is rising, but escalation to voting, public statements, or capital decisions remains the exception rather than the rule.
Read our joint report with ShareAction →Where does the evidence of escalation actually sit?
Stewardship Signal structures what UK Stewardship Code signatories have disclosed about their escalation approaches, including which firms document a clear path from engagement to voting to capital decisions, and which describe escalation in principle without providing evidence of it in practice. The data reflects what has been published; Stewardship Signal makes it searchable and comparable.
Explore the platform →Stewardship resourcing shifted from peripheral and generalist to professionalised and specialised. Between 2022 and 2024, dedicated teams and clearer governance structures emerged as a key differentiator of disclosed stewardship capability.
By 2022, RBC Brewin Dolphin expanded its stewardship team, explicitly linking responsible ownership to improved outcomes. Railpen's evolution between 2023 and 2024 illustrates a more advanced stage: a multidisciplinary team incorporating governance expertise, investment management experience, a dedicated climate analyst, and administrative support.
Based on what firms disclosed about team size and structure in their published reports. Figures are illustrative of the range observed, not a precise count.
Evolution: Stewardship moved from a peripheral compliance function to a core investment capability with dedicated specialists. The next phase requires these teams to be held accountable not just for activity, but for building the decision-grade infrastructure that boards need.
The period from 2020 to 2024 saw a marked evolution in how stewardship is embedded within firms' governance architecture. Relatively siloed ESG committees with unclear authority gave way to cross-functional structures with formal board-level oversight.
State Street's ESG Committee, established in January 2022, comprises senior staff from investment, client-facing, legal, compliance, risk management, and operational teams. LGIM's Investment Stewardship Committee is chaired by an independent non-executive director, making stewardship subject to the same independent challenge as other key investment governance areas.
LGIM's 2024 UK Stewardship Code summary provides a clear example of the direction of travel. The oversight of conflicts of interest related to stewardship is delegated to the Investment Stewardship Committee and to a separate Conflicts of Interest Committee that includes multiple independent non-executive directors.
What does published stewardship governance actually look like across the market?
Stewardship Signal structures disclosures across the 12 UK Stewardship Code Principles, including governance arrangements, committee structures, and conflicts management, making it straightforward to review what firms have disclosed about their internal governance and how this has changed year on year.
Explore the platform →Investment in stewardship data and technology increased across leading firms, but system fragmentation remains a practical challenge. Robeco expanded its Sustainable Investing Open Access programme. Railpen announced plans to appoint a dedicated stewardship database and reporting provider. Despite this investment, asset owners still receive fragmented, retrospective data.
Railpen's 2023 reporting describes the launch of a Sustainable Ownership Review, alongside twice-yearly Sustainable Ownership Client Forum meetings, member-focused blogs, and animated explainer videos. Aviva recorded over 5,000 external participants across six CPD-accredited ESG training modules, a shift from passive reporting to active client education.
Proxy voting choice extended this empowerment further. State Street's 2022 programme offers eligible investors a range of voting policies: sustainability-oriented, social responsibility, labour-focused, faith-based, pro-management, and standard. By the 2023 proxy season, investors in more than 40% of index equity assets could exercise voting choice. BlackRock's Voting Choice initiative saw nearly USD 600 billion opt into the scheme by end of 2023.
Prior to 2022, fixed income stewardship was largely neglected; engagement, voting, and escalation frameworks were designed primarily for equity markets. State Street hired a full-time fixed income stewardship specialist in 2023. Robeco's Net Zero Roadmap explicitly included sovereign bond dialogue as one of its six key implementation actions.
ShareAction's Point of No Returns 2025 benchmarks 76 asset managers representing £63 trillion in AUM across governance, stewardship, climate, biodiversity, and social issues. Top performers include Robeco (76%) and APG (75%), with Aviva Investors among the top five UK-domiciled managers overall. The research focuses on policy positions and public commitments rather than stewardship report disclosure quality, but the directional findings are consistent with the patterns observed across the 126 reports in this dataset.
Read our joint report with ShareAction →The data behind the report, structured and searchable.
Stewardship Signal is purpose-built to address the transparency gap this section describes. It extracts and structures what UK Stewardship Code signatories have disclosed, making it possible to search across published reports, compare disclosed approaches by theme or principle, and track how disclosures have changed year on year. The platform presents what firms have stated in their own reports; users draw their own conclusions.
Explore the platform →The chart below maps the relative characteristics of stewardship disclosure across eight dimensions, grouping firms into three tiers based on patterns observed in their published reports. This provides a composite picture of the stewardship landscape as it stands in 2025. The positions are illustrative of disclosed characteristics; they do not reflect scores assigned to any individual firm.
Illustrative only. Positions reflect the range of disclosed characteristics observed across the dataset, not scores assigned to any individual firm or group of firms.
Based on analysis of 126 published reports, three distinct tiers of stewardship capability are visible across the UK asset management industry in 2025. The characteristics below describe what firms in each tier have disclosed, not a rating of any individual firm. The gap between Tier 1 and Tier 3 is now visible to regulators, beneficiaries, and rating agencies.
Multi-year thematic campaigns · Integrated climate-nature-social frameworks · Proprietary analytics · Dedicated specialist teams · Systematic outcome measurement · Documented escalation logic · Board-level independent oversight
Basic ESG integration · Reactive engagement · Annual cycles · Reliance on third-party data · Activity-based reporting · Limited outcome tracking · Informal escalation · Climate-first with nature emerging. Growing 2026 compliance risk in outcomes and escalation disclosure.
Stewardship treated as compliance function · Minimal resourcing · Generic proxy voting · Limited collaborative participation · No outcome tracking · No escalation logic disclosed · Activity metrics only. Significant regulatory exposure heading into 2026.
The table below describes the range of disclosed practice observed across the dataset. It is a descriptive framework, not a scoring tool.
| Dimension | Laggard pattern | Mid-pack pattern | Leader pattern |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team Resourcing | Part-time, ESG generalist | Dedicated, single theme | Multidisciplinary, cross-asset |
| Outcome Measurement | Activity counts only | Some outcome reporting | Systematic, real-economy impact |
| Thematic Depth | Climate only | Climate + 1–2 others | Integrated climate-nature-social |
| Technology & Data | Third-party feeds only | In-house analytics, fragmented | Proprietary systems, AI/ML |
| Engagement Approach | Reactive, annual | Mix of annual & multi-year | Multi-year with milestones |
| Escalation Logic | Mechanical voting policy | Engagement + voting, some linkage | Documented framework with triggers |
| Collaborative Leadership | Peripheral participation | Active member | Co-leads, policy authorship |
| Board Visibility | Annual summary | Quarterly reporting | Real-time decision-grade systems |
These questions separate stewardship that is procedurally compliant from stewardship that is substantively defensible. Asset owners should ask their stewardship managers, and themselves, these questions regularly.
The evidence across 126 stewardship reports is consistent: the market has moved. But knowing it has moved is not enough. The value of this paper is in what it surfaces for action, and that looks different depending on where you sit in the investment chain.
Ask your managers to show you the escalation path from a real engagement this year, not the policy, but the documented decision logic. If they can't, that is the gap to close first. Structured disclosure tools mean you no longer have to rely on manager self-presentation to prepare for oversight meetings.
Trajectory matters more than snapshot. A manager whose published disclosures have materially improved over three years often tells a more useful story than one whose reports haven't changed. The ability to compare what managers have actually disclosed, year on year, side by side, is now a research infrastructure question, not just a reading hours question.
Your published stewardship report is already being read and structured by tools like Stewardship Signal. The question is whether your own team has the same visibility your clients are starting to gain. The 2026 Code's outcomes focus rewards firms who can connect engagement activity to investment decisions, in their report and in reality.
Three questions worth asking now, regardless of your role: Can you explain how stewardship influenced a decision in the past twelve months, not just that engagement happened, but what changed as a result? Is the governance around stewardship decision-making visible and defensible? And could you describe the escalation path taken in at least one material engagement, from first contact to outcome?
Illustrative only. Based on patterns observed in published reports; not a measure of any individual firm's performance or regulatory standing.
The question is no longer whether stewardship matters; it's whether the infrastructure behind your stewardship can withstand scrutiny from regulators, beneficiaries, and the investment chain.
Maanch Stewardship Under Scrutiny, 2026"Fostering effective stewardship practices and outcomes requires all stakeholders across the investment chain to work collaboratively, aligned with the common goal of sustainable value creation for the end-saver."
Andrew Ninian, Director of Stewardship and Corporate Governance, Investment Association
From Realigning Stewardship: Delivering Sustainable Value Through Stewardship, Investment Association, which sets out 10 recommendations for reframing stewardship around outcomes, reducing reporting burdens, and enhancing transparency across the investment chain.
The five-year evolution described in this paper has different practical implications depending on where you sit in the investment chain.
Maanch builds infrastructure for stewardship intelligence and delivery. Our two products serve different sides of the investment chain, and together they address the gap this paper documents: the distance between what stewardship reports say and what stewardship practice looks like.
Stewardship Signal extracts and structures information from publicly available UK Stewardship Code reports using AI-assisted interpretation. It does not produce ESG ratings, investment advice, or assessments of stewardship quality. It presents what firms have disclosed in their own published reports: structured, searchable, and comparable.
Asset owners, investment consultants, and fund selectors use Stewardship Signal to review manager disclosures, track changes year on year, and prepare for manager oversight meetings, without reading hundreds of pages of PDFs.
Launched at Asset Owner Day 2026. Growing beyond the 40 firms in this whitepaper.
Explore Stewardship Signal →The Maanch Engagement Tracker is an operational platform for asset managers and stewardship teams. It centralises engagement plans, interactions, votes, actions, and outcomes, creating a clean evidence trail for outcomes-focused reporting under the 2026 Code.
Teams use it to tag activity to objectives and themes, track escalation logic, link engagement to investment decisions, and produce proportionate reporting across asset classes, including fixed income and private markets, without the end-of-year scramble.
Purpose-built for Code 2026 outcomes-focused reporting requirements.
Explore Engagement Tracker →To learn more about either product or to speak with the team, visit maanch.com or reach out directly. We work with asset owners, managers, and consultants across the UK stewardship landscape.