The ambition was never the problem. The frameworks exist. The commitments are public. What most companies actually lack is the operational machinery to deliver on any of it.

---

Anti-ESG bills moving through US state legislatures. BlackRock choosing its words more carefully. Fund managers peeling sustainability labels off products faster than they stuck them on three years ago. If you only read the opinion pages, you could be forgiven for thinking the whole movement is evolving.

But inside actual companies, the conversation sounds nothing like the headlines. Talk to a Head of Sustainability at a European manufacturer, or a procurement director at a US-based food company, or a compliance lead at a mid-sized logistics firm. Nobody is questioning whether ESG matters. They are too busy figuring out how to do it properly with the people and systems they have.

They have signed up to carbon reduction targets, published human rights policies, and committed to supplier codes of conduct. What they do not have is the operational capacity to deliver against those commitments in a way that is consistent, evidence-based, and sustainable over time. Their ambition has outrun their infrastructure.

This is the execution gap. It is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of infrastructure. And it is becoming a critical challenge in corporate sustainability.

 

Where ESG Execution Is Actually Breaking

What makes the execution gap so persistent is that it does not look like a crisis. There is no single dramatic failure. Instead, there is a slow accumulation of friction that quietly degrades a company’s ability to manage ESG with any real rigour.

Ownership is unclear - In most organisations, sustainability work is distributed across functions that were never designed to carry it. Procurement handles supplier assessments, but their primary job is cost and continuity. HR tracks diversity data between hiring and retention priorities. The facilities manager logs energy consumption between building maintenance and contractor schedules. The work lives in the gaps between other priorities, which means it gets done reactively and unevenly.

A 2024 KPMG ESG Organisation Survey found a disconnect between how prepared companies believe they are and how prepared they actually are. The targets get set at board level. The tracking is supposed to happen three levels down, in teams that have other jobs to do.

Evidence is disorganised - Companies produce enormous amounts of ESG-relevant information: training records, audit reports, certifications, waste transfer notes, supplier questionnaires, incident logs, energy invoices. But it is scattered across email attachments, shared drives, local folders, and legacy systems. When a rating agency sends an assessment or a customer asks for proof of compliance, teams spend weeks assembling information that should be available in hours. Research by analyst firms such as Verdantix consistently points to sustainability teams spending a disproportionate share of their working time on manual data gathering rather than analysis or improvement.

Supplier data remains a blind spot - Scope 3 emissions alone typically account for over 70% of a company’s total carbon footprint. But response rates to supplier ESG questionnaires remain stubbornly low, often well below 50%. The data that comes back is often inconsistent, incomplete, or provided in formats that make aggregation painful. For companies with hundreds or thousands of suppliers, this requires structured processes, clear expectations, and tools that make it easier for suppliers to respond.

Ratings demand is relentless - Companies are assessed by an expanding universe of ESG ratings platforms, each with its own methodology, data requests, and scoring criteria. CDP wants climate data in one format. EcoVadis asks about management systems. MSCI scores based on public disclosures. Sustainalytics takes yet another approach. Because the methodologies differ, a strong score in one does not guarantee a strong score in another. The result is perpetual preparation rather than genuine capability building.

The commercial weight of these ratings is growing. Schneider Electric processes its entire network of over 50,000 tier-one suppliers through annual ESG risk screening and requires strategic suppliers to hold and improve their EcoVadis scores year on year (source: Schneider Electric 2024 Universal Registration Document, pp. 240–242). L’Oréal subjects nearly 1,000 suppliers to annual EcoVadis assessments, with strategic suppliers expected to maintain scores that meet group benchmarks (source: L’Oréal 2023 Universal Registration Document, p. 202). These are becoming standard practice among large European and multinational buyers.

 

Why the Pressure Is Compounding Now

These operational weaknesses are not new. What has changed is that external pressure is now bearing down hard enough to make the execution gap genuinely consequential.

Regulation is raising the bar - The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, alongside Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, France’s Duty of Vigilance law, and similar legislation elsewhere, is turning supply chain scrutiny into a legal obligation. These regulations ask companies to demonstrate due diligence, identify risks, take action, and monitor results across their value chains. A missed risk is no longer just a reputational issue. It is a compliance failure with potential legal and financial consequences.

Customers are getting specific - Large buyers are cascading reporting obligations down the supply chain, and the questions have become sharply more specific. Now, customers want quantified targets, timelines, third-party verification, and documented year-over-year progress. A multinational consumer goods company recently told its top 200 suppliers that ESG performance would carry a 15% weighting in procurement decisions by 2027.

Investors want data, not narrative - A 2024 Bloomberg Intelligence report projected that global ESG assets under management are on track to surpass $40 trillion by 2030. Institutional investors are less interested in glossy sustainability reports and more interested in structured, comparable, auditable data they can integrate into financial models. They want governance structures that demonstrate real oversight, and increasingly, independent assurance that the numbers a company reports are the numbers it can stand behind. Banks and lenders are moving in the same direction: sustainability-linked loans increasingly require borrowers to demonstrate measurable ESG performance against agreed criteria.

Ratings are becoming gatekeepers - A growing number of large corporations now require minimum ESG rating scores from suppliers as a condition of doing business. A poor or absent rating is no longer embarrassing. It is disqualifying.

 

The Mid-Market Squeeze

Mid-sized firms, companies with revenues roughly between €50 million and €500 million, occupy the most uncomfortable position. They sit above the thresholds that allow smaller companies to fly under the radar, but below the scale that gives large corporates the resources to absorb new requirements. They receive the same customer questionnaires and face the same rating assessments as businesses five or ten times their size.

But the typical mid-market company has one sustainability person, sometimes part-time, splitting ESG responsibilities with quality management or health and safety. They need to respond to an EcoVadis assessment, answer a customer’s carbon disclosure request, prepare for CSRD reporting, and keep the board informed, often in parallel, often with incomplete data. The workload is enterprise-grade. The capacity is not.

Multiple analyses of CSRD readiness confirm that mid-sized enterprises lag significantly behind large companies in ESG reporting maturity. The EU’s own phased CSRD timeline implicitly acknowledges this gap, granting smaller in-scope companies two or more additional years to prepare. That gap is widening. Mid-market companies that cannot demonstrate credible ESG performance are at growing risk of being excluded from supply chains or disadvantaged in financing discussions. For these firms, the execution gap is not an operational inconvenience. It is a competitive vulnerability with a direct line to revenue.

The mid-market is where the execution gap bites hardest. The expectations are enterprise-grade. The resources are not.

 

The Structural Shift Underway

Underneath the noise, the market is recalibrating what ESG performance actually means. The time of ESG as primarily a communications exercise is closing. What is replacing it is less photogenic and significantly more demanding.

Policy is giving way to proof - Policies without implementation evidence are increasingly treated as a gap, not an asset.

Disclosure is giving way to data quality - Frameworks like GRI, SASB, and ESRS have standardised what gets disclosed. But the frontier has moved to whether the underlying data is accurate, consistent, auditable, and traceable to source.

One-off projects are giving way to systems - The shift is toward repeatable systems that generate data continuously. Deloitte’s 2025 C-suite Sustainability Report found that 79% of executives surveyed are either transforming their business model or embedding sustainability considerations across their organisation, rather than managing it as a standalone function.

Storytelling is giving way to verification - The CSRD mandates third-party limited assurance on sustainability disclosures, and although the EU’s 2025 Omnibus package removed the originally planned escalation to reasonable assurance, external auditors will increasingly scrutinise ESG data with methods that approach those applied to financial statements.

Siloed teams are giving way to cross-functional ownership - The most effective model is one where procurement owns supplier ESG data, finance owns reporting controls, operations owns environmental data, and the sustainability function coordinates rather than carries everything.

 

What Leading Companies Are Doing Differently

There is no magic in what distinguishes companies managing ESG execution well. The differences are mundane, operational, and entirely replicable.

They have built repeatable processes - Quarterly data collection, annual supplier engagement cycles, rolling evidence management. When a questionnaire arrives, the response is assembly and review, not crisis mobilisation.

They have embedded continuous improvement - They set specific targets, track performance at defined intervals, conduct gap analyses, and adjust. They treat ESG metrics with the same seriousness that quality managers apply to defect rates. But the majority of companies still treat ESG targets as annual reporting fixtures rather than operational metrics that get actively managed throughout the year.

They have centralised their evidence base - Certifications, audit reports, training records, supplier assessments, and policy approvals are stored where they can be retrieved in hours, not weeks. Not necessarily in a single platform, but through a deliberate decision to organise documentation so it is findable, current, and linked to reporting requirements. The secret is not technology. It is the decision to treat ESG evidence with the same discipline companies already apply to financial records.

They have clarified ownership with specificity - Every material ESG topic has a named individual accountable for data quality, timeliness, and completeness. When responsibility is diffuse, nobody moves. When it is specific, people act.

They treat ratings as an output, not an objective - Instead of optimising for any single methodology, they build genuine capability and strong underlying data. The ratings follow.

 

What Will Actually Separate Winners From The Rest

The next phase of ESG will be less interesting to write about and more important to get right.

It will not be defined by bold pledges at Davos, or glossy reports with aerial photographs of solar panels, or debates about whether the three letters should be retired. It will be showcased by whether companies can deliver on what they have committed to, and prove it, repeatedly, to stakeholders who are no longer willing to take them at their word.

The companies that will earn trust, retain contracts, and access capital on favourable terms will not necessarily be those with the most ambitious strategies. They will be the ones that have built the organisational muscle to collect, manage, verify, and communicate ESG performance as a matter of routine.

Execution capacity is becoming the differentiator. Not the policy. Not the pledge. Not the report. The ability to deliver, document, and improve, consistently, across the business, over time.

The backlash narrative will continue. But inside companies, the operational work goes on, quietly, imperfectly, and with growing urgency. The organisations that invest now in systems, evidence management, clear ownership, and genuine continuous improvement will find themselves with something far more valuable than a good story: the ability to meet whatever comes next with substance rather than scramble.