About
About
The Center for Active Stewardship (CAS) is a non-profit research organization housed at the Jain Family Institute. We leverage the financial industry to drive ambitious climate and social goals
Context
The engines of our current economic system are powerful and have brought abundant wealth to many across the globe. However, their guiding incentives are short-term in nature, and have shaped a system that unsustainably exhausts climate and biodiversity budgets, and spreads negative externalities to people and communities in ways that are not easily represented on a balance sheet. The global public, including investors, is becoming more conscious of the externalized costs of this system, and is seeking a balance between the material wealth the system produces and the mounting bill we will eventually have to pay for it. Striking this balance is the goal of sustainable finance and ESG.
CAS’s mission is to use new technologies to provide critical, missing public-benefit information infrastructure that is needed to amplify investors’ voices in this debate.
Problem
CAS focuses on the asset management industry — a layer of the financial system that stewards assets on behalf of hundreds of millions of individuals saving for their future, retirement, and children. Through asset manager intermediaries, these millions indirectly own much of our economic system. However, it is the managers, rather than their clients, who decide how this collective influence is wielded in shareholder voting — and their votes frequently fail to reflect their clients’ priorities around climate responsibility, respect for human rights, fair treatment of workers, responsible AI, and stronger corporate safeguards.
Despite sensational headlines around the demise of ESG, the public broadly supports stronger social and environmental responsibility: 83% of US adults do not trust companies to develop AI responsibly, 81% oppose child labor in supply chains, and 69% want corporations to more actively address climate change.1 However, shareholder campaigns for precisely these causes are receiving just a fraction of the support from asset managers that these statistics might suggest.2 This misalignment persists in large part because of the high cost, inaccessibility, and obscurity of stewardship information, which insulates asset managers and financial decision-makers from necessary scrutiny of their stewardship.
Theory of Change
CAS’s theory of change is simple: by making asset manager proxy voting transparent, free to access, and easy to understand, we make stewardship misalignment harder to ignore. As voting behavior becomes easier to assess, stewardship alignment shifts from an elusive, peripheral consideration to a competitive dimension of client retention, driving managers to vote more consistently with clients’ long-term, pro-social preferences. Simultaneously, making stewardship practices visible, comparable, and verifiable strengthens the ability of journalists and researchers to understand and communicate around asset manager voting, and empowers advocates and civil society organizations to apply pressure through increased scrutiny, public campaigns, and credible reputational threats. Given the scale of managers’ influence, these shifts will translate to materially increased support for labor, environmental, and governance accountability measures, and, over time, strengthen corporate responsibility and reduce systemic risks to people, communities, and climate.
1 Ipsos, 2023 (link); Data for Progress, 2023 (link); Pew Research, 2024 (link)
2Alexandra White, the FT, 2025 (link); Goldberg, Mencher, Flynn, Cooley, 2025 (link)