About
Platform Partners
The Impact Management Platform is a collaboration between the leading providers of sustainability standards
Rules or guidelines for common and repeated use to which organisations demonstrate adherence with which compliance is not necessarily mandatory in law. Standards are created through a process of multi-stakeholder consultation. Source: Adapted from ISEAL Information or instructions on how to do something. Source: Cambridge English DictionaryStandard
Guidance
These Partners are working together to identify opportunities to consolidate existing sustainability resources, collectively address gaps, and coordinate with policymakers and regulators.
Platform Objectives
The Platform Partners’ vision is for impact management to become a mainstream practice within business and finance.
Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires all market actors to understand, act on and communicate their impacts on people and the natural environment. This process, known as impact management, enables businesses, investors and financial institutions to reduce negative impacts, increase positive impacts, and ultimately achieve sustainability and increase well-being in line with international policy agreements such as the SDGs, the Paris Agreements, and others.
Impact management will only become a mainstream practice if a system of accessible, appropriate, complementary and interoperable resources is available to support market actors. In today’s multi-polar yet interconnected world this includes the availability of resources that respond to a spectrum of policy and regulatory approaches and ideologies.
The current landscape of sustainability-related standards, frameworks, guidance and other resources presents a number of gaps and overlaps which are not conducive to the mainstreaming of impact management.
The Platform’s mission is to cultivate an ecosystem of sustainability-related standards, frameworks, guidance and other resources that enables businesses, investors and financial institutions to manage their impacts on people and the natural environment, in adequation with the specific belief system or policy environment they operate in.
Platform Theory of Change
To fulfill its mission, the Impact Management Platform provides a convening space for peer exchange between the Platform Partners, the leading providers of sustainability standards, frameworks and guidance, as well as with other players in the field. This serves to increase the flow of information and knowledge across Partners and beyond.
As a result of access to peer information and enhanced knowledge, the Partners (as well as other actors) can coordinate their activities where relevant, identify opportunities for collaboration, address gaps and contribute to strengthening the system of sustainability-related standards, frameworks, guidance and other resources. Such collaboration can serve to provide clarity on impact management and how it applies in different policy contexts, to achieve greater complementarity and interoperability between resources, and to conduct shared research and development on specific aspects, challenges and gaps in the overall system.
Facilitating peer exchange and enabling collaboration contributes to greater coherence and completeness of the system of resources, which is necessary for market players to be able to readily engage with the practice of impact management and for this practice to be mainstreamed.
How it works
In order to implement their strategy, the Platform Partners:
- Engage in knowledge exchange among themselves and a wider set of international providers of impact management resources. This happens in various ways, including an Annual General Meeting as well as targeted peer exchange sessions throughout the year.
- Participate in collaborative projects that support the improvement of the system of resources and drive practitioner awareness and uptake of these resources. These can involve all or subsets of Partners on a voluntary basis, and are led by participating Partners accordingly. Specifically, the partners projects focus on either:
- Driving the awareness of practitioners and other stakeholders, including an understanding and uptake of the Partners’ resources and of their collaborative efforts
- Helping to improve the system of resources, by providing clarity on impact management, achieving greater complementarity and coherence between resources, or conducting shared research and development on challenges and gaps.
Governance
Two Partner organisations, including one Rotating Chair and the Hosting Partner, Co-Chair the Platform’s activities. The Co-Chairing Partners are responsible for the convening the Platform’s meetings, as well as helping to shape the agenda for the meetings and moderating discussions.
Partners Co-Chair on a voluntary basis for a two-year period. They are voted in by the Leadership Committee on a two-thirds majority basis.
OECD and UNEP FI were the founding Co-Chairs. Capitals Coalition and UNEP FI are the Co-chairs for 2025-2026 period. UNEP FI is currently the Hosting Partner.
Partners
Co-Chairs
Observers
