Abstract

Across climate, human rights, and public health, many NGOs have converged on a pragmatic rule of thumb when they try to move corporate behavior through markets and regulation: if you want systemic traction, lead with a depoliticised ESG risk perspective. This is not a retreat from values. It is a translation strategy that reframes contested moral and distributive questions into a form that can travel through the ESG “information chain”—standards and regulation, corporate disclosure, assurance, ratings and data products, investor stewardship, and ultimately resource allocation. This paper develops that claim as a researchable proposition: NGO ESG risk narratives tend to “work” when they depoliticise the perspective (who the audience is, what counts as relevant evidence, and what action is framed as reasonable), and when they maximise readability (a template that is legible, auditable, comparable, and computable across institutions). Drawing on prominent NGO and non-profit infrastructures—Carbon Tracker, CDP, World Benchmarking Alliance/CHRB, KnowTheChain, and the Access to Medicine Foundation—and on the surrounding institutional architecture (TCFD, ISSB/IFRS S1–S2, UNGPs, OECD due diligence guidance, and the EU’s evolving due diligence regime), the paper explains the mechanics of depoliticisation at three levels: language, epistemology, and institutions. It then maps the predictable costs: rights-holder invisibility, procedural compliance without substantive change, incentives for metric gaming, and cycles of re-politicisation as ESG becomes a target in polarised political environments (notably in the United States) and as regulatory ambition is contested or “simplified” (notably in the European Union). The paper ends with a research agenda that operationalises “depoliticised perspective” and “readability” into observable variables and process-traceable feedback loops.

Why “Depoliticised Perspective” Becomes the First Principle

The ESG field has matured into something more than “reporting.” It is increasingly an institutionalised pipeline for translating social and environmental claims into decision-useful signals. Standards specify what “good disclosure” looks like, companies produce information and narratives, assurance providers validate parts of that information, ratings and data vendors compress it into scores and comparable datasets, and investors and lenders use those outputs in stewardship and capital allocation. The more this pipeline hardens, the more it rewards narratives that can be ingested without reopening foundational ideological disputes.

That is the structural reason a depoliticised perspective becomes an NGO’s “first principle” in ESG risk work. When NGOs aim to influence corporate conduct through boardrooms, auditors, regulators, and investors—rather than primarily through public protest—the initial gatekeeping criteria shift. The question becomes less “is the claim morally compelling?” and more “is the claim legible to governance and finance routines, evidentiary norms, and accountability mechanisms?” Depoliticisation, in this narrow and specific sense, is the craft of meeting those criteria without abandoning the ethical core of the issue.

This shift is visible in the rise of NGOs and non-profits that function as ESG infrastructure providers rather than only as campaigners: they build benchmarks, questionnaires, investor toolkits, methodologies, and risk analyses that can be directly incorporated into corporate governance processes and investor decision-making. Carbon Tracker’s work on transition risk and “stranded assets” is often treated as a canonical example of this move: rather than leading with moral condemnation, it translates climate conflict into a financial risk narrative that mainstream financial institutions can use as input to assessment and action.

A depoliticised perspective also aligns naturally with the dominant disclosure template that has travelled globally through climate and sustainability standards. The TCFD framework, for instance, made “risk” a structuring device by organising disclosure into governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. The ISSB has explicitly aligned IFRS sustainability disclosure with this four-pillar logic, reinforcing “risk and opportunity” as the front-door language for sustainability-related information. For NGOs seeking impact through this pipeline, depoliticisation is not merely rhetorical: it is a way of matching institutional grammar.

What Depoliticisation Is—and Is Not

“Depoliticisation” is often misunderstood as neutrality or compromise. In ESG risk practice, it is better understood as strategic translation across systems. It has at least three layers.

At the first layer, depoliticisation is a discursive shift. The issue is framed less as a fight about values and more as a governance problem with identifiable risk exposures and mitigations: legal risk, supply chain risk, operational disruption, reputational risk, and systemic risk. This is the layer most people notice.

At the second layer, depoliticisation is epistemic. Contention is displaced from public moral dispute into questions of method: boundaries, materiality, measurement, uncertainty, and assurance scope. That move does not eliminate conflict; it changes its venue. Disagreement migrates into standards interpretation, auditability, and data architecture. A crucial implication is that NGOs must often fight for justice inside measurement conventions rather than only in public rhetoric.

At the third layer, depoliticisation is institutional. The claim is coupled to procedures that can compel action: disclosure obligations, due diligence requirements, board oversight expectations, investor stewardship norms, and the possibility of sanctions or capital repricing. In that form, “politics” is not absent—it is encoded into rules, routines, and incentives.

This is why depoliticisation is not the opposite of values. It is the process of embedding values into governance systems that operate under the language of risk, evidence, and accountability. Human rights due diligence standards illustrate the point well: the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) define corporate responsibility in terms of identifying, preventing, mitigating, and accounting for adverse impacts—procedural verbs that fit naturally into risk governance—while insisting that the relevant “risk” includes risk to rights-holders, not only to the firm. The OECD Guidelines similarly centre a risk-based due diligence process that is highly compatible with corporate governance routines while remaining anchored in normative expectations about harm and remedy.

Depoliticisation, in other words, is not “be less political.” It is “make the politics executable.”

NGOs as ESGInfrastructure: From Campaigners to “Visibility Engineers”

Once you view ESG as an information chain, you can see why many NGOs have started behaving like what James Scott might call readability engineers: actors who render complex realities legible to distant decision-makers through simplification, standardisation, and measurement. They do not merely advocate; they build instruments.

Consider the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB). Its approach exemplifies a depoliticised perspective: it assesses companies largely on publicly available information, it offers companies a chance to review and correct, and it draws on third-party sources in specific areas such as severe allegations. The benchmark creates a structured interface between human rights expectations and corporate disclosure practices. It also explicitly positions itself as useful for investors and stewardship, translating rights language into governance questions that can be asked in board-level engagement.

KnowTheChain operates similarly but with an even clearer risk-and-incentives logic. It focuses on forced labour risks and builds a benchmark to generate transparency and comparable performance signals, framing the mechanism of change through reputational and investor pressure as much as through moral argument. Its scoring guidance underscores that vague references to “ESG teams” are not enough; what matters are concrete governance arrangements, due diligence processes, and remedy—again translating normative concerns into auditable governance architecture.

The Access to Medicine Foundation offers another instructive case because it sits at the boundary between public health advocacy and investor action. It reports substantial uptake of its analyses by institutional investors and presents its work as decision-relevant for investment and engagement. This is depoliticisation in practice: the cause—equitable access to medicine—is morally charged, but the interface is built in a language investors can use without adopting a particular ideological identity.

CDP’s “write once, read many” logic pushes infrastructure-building even further. CDP translates disclosure expectations into questionnaires and datasets that can be reused across multiple frameworks, and it has presented its work as aligned with emerging disclosure regimes including IFRS S2. This is readability as a governance technology: it reduces transaction costs, standardises reporting, and makes information interoperable—conditions that allow ESG signals to circulate at scale.

Finally, Carbon Tracker illustrates how NGOs can recode conflict into investable risk research. Its transition risk framing is designed to be used inside financial analysis and stewardship initiatives, rather than only as external critique.

These cases suggest a general proposition: NGOs gain leverage in ESG not only by speaking louder, but by building the formats through which others must speak.

The Micro-Mechanics: How Depoliticisation Is Written into Text

Depoliticised perspective is not only a strategic posture. It is constructed through repeatable linguistic and rhetorical moves—small choices that have large institutional consequences because they determine whether a claim is treated as “actionable.”

One such move is the reassignment of agency. Politicised narratives often foreground perpetrators and victims; depoliticised risk narratives foreground systems, governance failures, and control breakdowns. The sentence architecture shifts from accusation to diagnosis: “the company exploits workers” becomes “the company lacks effective due diligence and remediation mechanisms to prevent adverse impacts.” That shift is not softer; it is a different pathway to accountability—one that fits corporate governance and assurance regimes.

A second move is the prioritisation of evidential markers. Depoliticised ESG texts repeatedly anchor claims in standards, methodologies, and observable indicators. CHRB’s assessment process—public information first, company review, targeted third-party sources—signals a deliberate effort to produce outputs that can be defended under scrutiny. This matters because the ESG pipeline is ultimately an evidentiary pipeline: a claim that cannot be audited, triangulated, or proceduralised is less likely to travel.

A third move involves modal discipline—how strongly the text commits to propositions. NGO risk narratives often avoid purely moral imperatives and instead present conditional logics: “If you do not address X, you are exposed to Y; therefore, governance and controls should be strengthened through Z.” The point is not to remove ethical force but to make the logic compatible with risk management routines, where conditionality and mitigation are the default grammar.

A fourth move is the conversion of political disagreement into materiality and boundary questions. This is where depoliticisation shows its deeper nature: values do not disappear; they re-enter through scope. What is included in the assessment? Which parts of the value chain count? How are weights assigned? What uncertainties are disclosed? Research on ESG ratings divergence has shown that disagreement across raters often comes from differences in scope, measurement, and weighting, not just from noise. Once this is understood, NGOs can be seen as participating in a politics of measurement: if they want to be heard, they must engage boundary-setting and weighting debates with methodological credibility.

The micro-level conclusion is straightforward: depoliticisation is the conversion of moral urgency into audit-ready accountability.

Institutional Coupling: Why Risk Framing Travels So Well

Depoliticised perspective succeeds not only because it is persuasive, but because it is institutionally compatible with the direction of travel in sustainability regulation and governance.

On the disclosure side, TCFD’s four-pillar template (governance, strategy, risk management, metrics/targets) has become a widely shared interface for climate and related disclosures. ISSB’s IFRS S1 and S2 further consolidate this compatibility by centring sustainability-related risks and opportunities and aligning content areas with the same broad structure. When the dominant disclosure grammar is “risk,” NGOs that speak in risk terms are not merely choosing a frame; they are choosing a protocol.

On the due diligence side, UNGPs and OECD guidance have long described corporate responsibility as a process: identify, prevent, mitigate, track, communicate, and remedy adverse impacts. The EU’s evolving sustainability due diligence regime extends this logic into law-like obligations for certain companies and value chains, even as the policy space continues to debate scope and burden. For NGOs, this is a powerful coupling point: they can demand not only outcomes but process integrity—governance structures, risk identification, supplier engagement, grievance mechanisms, and remedy—without needing to win every public argument about ideology.

The key institutional insight is that depoliticisation lowers the entry barrier into governance routines. A rights claim framed as “due diligence gap and unmanaged exposure” can be taken up by compliance teams, risk committees, assurance providers, and investors in a way that a purely moral indictment often cannot—at least not without triggering defensive polarisation.

Media and Backlash: Depoliticisation Improves Reach, Not Immunity

A depoliticised lens can broaden coalition space, but it cannot guarantee stability. ESG itself has become politically contested in some contexts. Scholarship on the politicisation of ESG in the United States documents how ESG—despite its technocratic self-presentation—has been recoded as a partisan object. This matters for NGOs because it changes the payoff matrix: even a carefully risk-framed claim may be treated as ideological if the broader field is polarised.

A telling contemporary signal comes from investor-facing climate activism: media reporting on Follow This’s decision to pause filing climate resolutions points to a shifting political environment and declining institutional investor support for climate resolutions, in a context that includes legal and political pressures on investors. Whether one agrees with the tactical choice or not, the case illustrates a core boundary condition: depoliticisation helps a claim enter institutions, but institutional willingness to act remains politically contingent.

Europe offers a different type of boundary condition: the politics of “simplification.” Reporting on the EU’s Omnibus package describes proposals to reduce burdens and recalibrate scope and requirements, while also triggering concerns among civil society groups and some investors about dilution of accountability. Here, depoliticisation runs into distributional conflict: how much reporting is too much, who bears the cost, and what level of transparency is necessary to prevent greenwashing. These are political questions even if expressed in administrative language.

The broader conclusion is not that depoliticisation fails, but that it functions best as an entry strategy. When the field becomes overtly political, NGOs often need a second gear: the ability to re-politicise at key moments to defend the legitimacy of accountability itself.

The System View: Readability as Power in Feedback Loops

From a systems perspective, ESG is not primarily a marketplace of arguments; it is a marketplace of signals. A narrative “succeeds” when it becomes a signal that alters incentives and behaviour through feedback loops: disclosure affects ratings, ratings affect capital costs and access, those effects reshape internal governance and data systems, and the cycle repeats.

Depoliticised perspective has an advantage because it tends to produce signals that are easier to integrate. If a claim is framed as a risk, it can be placed into risk registers, audit plans, and investor engagement agendas. If it is framed as a measurable gap, it can be scored, tracked, assured, and compared. CDP’s emphasis on interoperability—turning standards into reusable questions and data points—illustrates how readability enables circulation at scale. CHRB and KnowTheChain show how benchmarks make issues comparable and usable for investor engagement.

But the same system dynamics generate predictable distortions. Ratings divergence research shows that ESG scores can disagree substantially due to differences in scope, measurement, and weighting. This creates incentives for “signal shopping,” selective disclosure alignment, and the governance equivalent of gaming: optimising what is measured and rewarded, not necessarily what matters most to rights-holders or ecosystems.

This is the central trade: readability creates leverage, and leverage creates incentives—some aligned with impact, some aligned with impression management. Depoliticisation makes a narrative legible to the system; it also makes the narrative susceptible to being absorbed as compliance theatre.

The Costs: What Depoliticisation Can Erase—and How Politics Returns

The most serious ethical and strategic risk of depoliticised perspective is rights-holder invisibility. UNGPs explicitly emphasise that risk assessment should not focus only on what is “material” to the company but should include risk to people whose rights are affected. Yet the more ESG is translated into firm-centric risk and into auditable procedures, the more the lived experience of affected communities can be displaced by policy documents, governance charts, and metrics that look robust but may not capture reality.

A second cost is procedural substitution. When benchmarks and disclosure regimes reward the existence of policies and processes, companies can improve scores through documentation and reporting improvements without commensurate change on the ground. KnowTheChain’s insistence on specific governance and remedy elements, rather than generic “ESG team” statements, reflects an attempt to defend against this drift. But the risk remains because auditability often privileges what can be documented over what is complex and contested.

A third cost is the creation of new politics inside measurement. As rating divergence research and OECD analysis suggest, methodological choices carry power: scope boundaries, indicators, and weights effectively define what counts as performance. Depoliticisation does not eliminate politics; it relocates it into the technical infrastructure.

Finally, politics returns externally through backlash, regulatory contestation, and strategic litigation. The more sustainability governance constrains discretion, the more it can become a symbolic target in polarised environments. That is why a depoliticised perspective should be treated as the first principle for system entry, not the final strategy for durable legitimacy.

A Research Agenda: Making “Depoliticised Perspective” Empirically Testable

If “depoliticised perspective” is to be more than a plausible story, it must be operationalised. The most promising approach is to study NGOs as actors in an information chain and to track how their outputs become inputs elsewhere.

A useful definition of “narrative success” in this context has three observable dimensions. First, uptake: does the NGO framing enter corporate disclosure, governance documents, and risk registers? Second, translation: does it become embedded in intermediary systems such as benchmarks, ratings methodologies, investor stewardship tools, and assurance scopes? Third, consequence: does it correlate with changes in organisational resource allocation—staffing, data systems, supplier requirements, grievance mechanisms, and remediation practices?

“Depoliticised perspective” can then be measured through a combined textual and institutional index. On the textual side, indicators include the dominance of risk vocabulary over moral vocabulary, the prevalence of audit-ready claims (methods, standards anchors, evidence markers), the degree to which agency is expressed through governance processes rather than moral accusation, and the framing of conflict as boundary/materiality/assurance questions. On the institutional side, indicators include interoperability (can the output be used in major disclosure and due diligence frameworks), methodological transparency, and usability for stewardship and compliance routines. CDP’s explicit positioning around interoperability and alignment with emerging standards provides a concrete starting point for such operationalisation. CHRB and KnowTheChain provide similarly codable artefacts: scoring rubrics, assessment rules, and investor guidance.

A robust study would then use process tracing on a small number of cases—an NGO initiative, an intermediary uptake channel, and a corporate response—built around time-stamped events such as methodology updates, benchmark releases, investor engagements, regulatory changes, or major controversies. Carbon Tracker’s integration into broader investor and benchmarking ecosystems offers a plausible pathway for such tracing. The design should also include rights-holder-facing data collection, consistent with UNGPs’ emphasis on meaningful engagement with affected stakeholders, so that “success” does not reduce to improved paperwork.

Finally, research must incorporate boundary conditions: political polarisation (US ESG politicisation scholarship), regulatory recalibration (EU “simplification” debates), and measurement uncertainty (ratings divergence). These conditions help explain when depoliticised perspective yields leverage and when it is overwhelmed by external politics or internal gaming.

Conclusion: Depoliticisation Is the Entry Grammar, Not the Mission Grammar

This paper has argued that, for NGOs operating inside ESG risk pipelines, a depoliticised perspective is often the first principle because it is the most reliable way to make ethical claims institutionally actionable. It works by translating contested politics into risk governance objects that can be disclosed, assured, benchmarked, scored, and acted upon through stewardship and regulation. The NGO infrastructures surveyed here show how this translation is built in practice: through methodologies, questionnaires, benchmarks, and investor toolkits that maximise readability and interoperability.

Yet the same mechanism produces its own vulnerabilities. Depoliticised perspective can suppress rights-holder visibility, incentivise procedural compliance over substantive change, and relocate politics into technical boundary-setting. External politics can also return abruptly through backlash and regulatory contestation, especially in polarised environments.

A practical implication follows: NGOs need not choose between “politics” and “risk.” They need a two-level narrative capability—risk translation to enter and steer institutional loops, and selective re-politicisation to defend the public meaning of harm, responsibility, and remedy when the system’s readability starts to obscure lived reality. In ESG, depoliticisation is often the price of admission. It should never become the price of forgetting what the admission was for.