Enviromental and Social Governance: Key for Accountability in Conservation and Development

There is a quiet paradox at the heart of today's sustainability conversation. The organizations that spend their days restoring mangroves, training indigenous land guardians, measuring biodiversity baselines, and building equitable governance structures in fragile territories, the NGOs, foundations, and civil society coalitions of the third sector, are often the least visible players in the ESG discourse. And yet they are, in practice, doing ESG work before ESG had a name.

The time has come to close that gap, not merely to speak the language of ESG, but to actively reshape it from within.

 

A Framework Born for Finance, Borrowed by Mission

ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance, emerged as a screening mechanism for investors seeking to value companies beyond traditional financial indicators. Its logic was straightforward: measuring a firm's carbon footprint, its labor practices, and the integrity of its leadership, and you have a richer picture of long-term risk and value. In the corporate world, ESG reporting has largely been a compliance exercise, a way to satisfy regulators, attract capital, and manage reputational risk.

Yet, as Jennifer Hawkins argued in her influential 2023 piece in Blue Avocado, nonprofits can learn from the for-profit sector's experience with ESG and begin to apply these corporate strategies to their own work, not as an imitation, but as an opportunity to document and communicate impact with greater rigor. Crucially, Hawkins distinguishes ESG from its older cousin, Corporate Social Responsibility: where CSR has historically been internally focused and self-regulated, ESG is designed for external stakeholders, demanding measurable benchmarks and transparent reporting.

For organizations in the conservation and sustainable development space, this distinction is not merely semantic. Field-based NGOs generate extraordinary social and environmental value,  but they have long struggled to translate that value into the structured, comparable, investor-readable language that unlocks major funding, strategic partnerships, and institutional legitimacy. ESG, properly adapted, offers precisely that infrastructure.

 

The organizations restoring ecosystems and building equitable governance in fragile territories are, in practice, doing ESG work before ESG had a name.

 

The "E" That Keeps Losing Its Biodiversity

If there is one area where the third sector should be leading the ESG reform agenda, it is in the treatment of biodiversity within the Environmental pillar. As Kopnina, Zhang, Anthony, Hassan and Maroun documented in their 2024 study published in the Journal of Environmental Management, traditional ESG metrics have primarily associated the "E" pillar with climate change and carbon emissions, relegating biodiversity loss to a peripheral concern, despite the fact that more than half of global GDP is dependent on nature and its ecosystem services.

This is not an academic quibble. For an NGO running a jaguar corridor restoration programme in the Chocó-Darién, or a watershed protection initiative in the Andes, the reduction of a complex ecological intervention to a carbon credit figure is not just analytically inadequate, it is distorting. It invisibilizes the very work that makes conservation projects effective and durable.

The emergence of the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), launched in November 2023, and the updated GRI 101: Biodiversity 2024 standard signal that the mainstream ESG world is slowly correcting course. The TNFD offers organizations a framework to measure, manage and disclose their nature-related dependencies, applying to the natural world the same rigour that the TCFD brought to climate risk. Conservation NGOs are uniquely positioned to become the technical referents for this shift, given their deep expertise in ecosystem monitoring, species baselines, and landscape-scale interventions.

 

The "S" and "G" Where Civil Society Excels

Beyond the environmental dimension, the Social and Governance pillars represent terrain where the third sector has accumulated decades of practice and hard-won learning that the corporate ESG world is only beginning to acknowledge.

Community engagement, free prior and informed consent, gender equity in programme design, inclusive governance of natural resources, intercultural dialogue, and accountability to local beneficiaries, these are not add-ons to a conservation project. They are its architecture. Yet standard ESG frameworks, built with listed companies in mind, struggle to capture these dimensions in ways that reflect their complexity and their causal role in long-term project success.

As Karen Baum and Corey Eide of BDO argued in their 2023 analysis, nonprofits are uniquely positioned to leverage ESG to enhance their mission and brand precisely because their orientation is not compliance-driven but mission-driven. While corporations adopt ESG reactively in response to investor demands, civil society organizations can approach the same framework proactively,  as a strategic tool to strengthen programme design, deepen donor engagement, and tell a more holistic story of impact.

The Governance pillar deserves special attention in this context. Conservation projects implemented in contexts of weak state presence, contested territorial rights, or complex multi-stakeholder dynamics face governance challenges of extraordinary delicacy. Indigenous autonomy, co-management arrangements, transparent benefit-sharing mechanisms, and anti-corruption safeguards are governance issues that operate at a scale and complexity that standard ESG checklists rarely capture. Here too, the third sector has the expertise, and, from my point of view, the obligation, to push for more sophisticated standards.

 

The Risk of Greenwashing in Reverse

One danger that conservationists must acknowledge honestly is what we might call "mission-washing through ESG": the risk that adopting ESG language becomes an exercise in narrative repackaging rather than genuine accountability. The same greenwashing that regulators have aggressively pursued in the corporate world, where funds slap "sustainable" labels on unchanged portfolios, can equally afflict civil society organizations that adopt ESG branding without building the measurement infrastructure to back it up.

Rigorous ESG adoption in the third sector requires investment in monitoring, evaluation and learning systems; in data quality; in honest reporting of both successes and failures; and in governance processes that give voice to the communities that projects purport to serve. This is not cheap, and it is not fast. But it is the only path to a form of ESG credibility that can meaningfully strengthen the sector's access to resources and its accountability to the people whose territories and livelihoods are at stake.

 

A Call for Third-Sector Leadership

The ESG frameworks in use today were written largely without the third sector at the table. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the TNFD, the updated GRI biodiversity standards, and the proliferating suite of sustainability disclosure requirements represent a historic opportunity to correct that omission. Conservation and development NGOs should not be passive recipients of frameworks designed for listed companies. They should be active co-authors of the next generation of standards, bringing with them the methodological rigour, the community accountability, and the ecological literacy that the corporate ESG world sorely needs.

The forest does not care whether it is protected by a carbon market or an NGO field team. But the people who depend on that forest, and the investors and donors who fund its protection, deserve frameworks that can honestly account for the difference. That is the work that lies ahead.