Stakeholder Engagement at a Crossroads: What’s Working, What’s Not, and What’s Next

Ceres will convene a facilitated, peer-learning discussion to bring together corporate sustainability professionals to reflect candidly on how stakeholder engagement is evolving in today’s complex and polarized environment. Participants will share both more and less effective examples of past engagement efforts and explore how companies can adapt their approaches to the perception or reality that stakeholder expectations, regulatory pressures, and business realities may be increasingly diverging. Rather than aspirational models, the conversation is designed to surface practical insights, tradeoffs, and positive examples fit for the current moment and what lies ahead. This session will be held under the Chatham House Rule.

Session Objectives:

By the end of the session, participants will:

• Share real-world experiences with stakeholder engagement, including what has driven value and where efforts have fallen short.
• Identify common challenges and tradeoffs companies face as stakeholder perspectives become more divided and harder to reconcile.
• Explore how engagement strategies are evolving, including shifts toward more targeted, strategic, or integrated approaches.
• Surface emerging best practices that are credible, replicable and aligned with business constraints in the current context.
• Learn from peers to inform how their own organizations may refine stakeholder engagement over the next 2–3 years.