Who's who
The network behind the Imperatives
Eight organisations stewarded the 2020 campaign. Here is who they are, and where they are now.
The Imperatives were not written by one organisation. They were negotiated across a network of business associations, investor groups and media companies that already had their own agendas. Knowing who they are explains both the strengths of the framework (mainstream reach) and its limits (consensus language).
The stewards
B Lab
The non-profit behind B Corp certification, which assesses companies on governance, workers, community, environment and customers. The largest membership base in the network and the main source of its "stakeholder" vocabulary.
The B Team
A group of business and civil-society leaders founded in 2013 to push for a "Plan B" for business, with a focus on climate, governance and tax.
JUST Capital
A US non-profit that ranks large listed companies on how they treat workers, customers, communities, shareholders and the environment, using public polling to weight the criteria.
CECP
Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose: a coalition of large-company chief executives focused on long-term plans and investor communication.
Conscious Capitalism
A movement and membership organisation built on four tenets: higher purpose, stakeholder orientation, conscious leadership and conscious culture.
GIIN
The Global Impact Investing Network, the main industry body for impact investors, which publishes the sector's market-sizing and measurement standards.
Common Future
A US organisation that redirects capital to community-led economic initiatives, with an explicit focus on racial wealth gaps.
Participant
A media company that finances film and television intended to drive social change, and that funded the campaign's storytelling.
Where they are now
By 2026 the coordinating network described itself in the past tense, having been active from 2020 to 2026. The member organisations continue independently, and several have changed emphasis: B Lab rewrote its certification standards; JUST Capital expanded its worker-focused rankings; GIIN's market estimates for impact investing passed one trillion dollars in assets. The coalition's own website moved to a different domain. Imperatives is not connected to any of them.
What the network got right, and what it did not
It proved that mainstream business associations could agree on language that would have been radical a decade earlier. It did not solve the problem of enforcement: none of the stewards could compel a member to change its pay structure or its lobbying. That gap is the reason the third imperative, accountability through measurement, matters more than the other two.