This chapter delves into the ongoing debate surrounding institutional investor engagement, spanning sporadic voting to strategic shareholder activism. Focusing on the stewardship role of institutional investors as shareholders, referred to as shareholder stewardship, it contextualizes this in a historical context within corporate governance. The focus is placed on micro-level shareholder stewardship – how institutional investors monitor and engage with specific companies in their portfolios – emphasizing its alignment with traditional notions of shareholder engagement. The chapter illustrates that micro-level shareholder stewardship extends beyond mere investor engagement. It involves firm-level shareholder engagement to improve long-term company performance, alongside a commitment to meeting ultimate beneficiaries’investment needs and serving public interests, such as addressing saver needs and mitigating externalities, like climate change. Furthermore, the chapter identifies hedge-fund-style activists as key players in micro-level shareholder stewardship, offering new empirical evidence on their global scale. Despite variations, a category of investors – the activist shareholder stewards – emerges from stewardship disclosures, fulfilling the stewardship role in corporate governance.

, During the 1980s and early 1990s, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the country, thousands of gay men and lesbians perished from AIDS-related infections. Their same-sex partners quickly discovered that they had no rights because the law did not recognize their relationships. Advocates consequently pressed municipalities to adopt domestic partnership programs, a concept that originated in union efforts to secure benefits for unmarried partners. In the 1980s, cities, towns, and counties around the country began offering both health benefits to their employees as well as registries where all couples could record their commitment. The total number of these programs were small, and the rights they offered were limited. However, they helped produce new debates over the nature and meaning of family. They also inspired queer workers in the private sector to demand domestic partnership benefits from their employers. By the mid-1990s, domestic partnership benefits had become a mainstay of corporate America.

The first element of understanding how to improve the health and well-being of a population relies on a thorough assessment of the needs of the specified population, be it a local population defined by geography, a specific age group or those with certain characteristics. This chapter begins by considering how ‘health need’ can be conceptualized; the distinction between need, demand and supply; and the difference between health needs and the need for health-care. Secondly, the wider determinants of health are introduced and their relation to health needs discussed. Finally, the steps involved in a systematic assessment of the health needs of a defined population are explained, including tools and resources used to achieve this. Practical challenges are considered.

There are multiple obstacles to accessing judicial remedies for transnational harms, all of which combine to make access to justice for victims of human rights violations by TNCs exceptionally difficult and frequently impossible. The twin principles of separate legal personality and limited liability, together with limitations on extraterritorial jurisdiction and the evidentiary burdens of bringing a claim, are major barriers that victims encounter. While each issue plays an important role in denying victims a chance of obtaining access to remedy, the complex corporate structures that characterize the organization of modern business are at the heart of these obstacles. In the absence of legislation clarifying standards for parent company liability, victims face an enormous challenge to demonstrate how a parent company of a multinational enterprise, domiciled in the home state, bears responsibility for the harm carried out by its subsidiary in the host state.

A description of the varied types of complex business structures employed by large, transnational businesses is outside the scope of this book. However, a few key facts about corporate growth and structure are important to note, given the current jurisdictional paradigm’s focus on the “home” (or in Europe, domicile) of a corporation – a paradigm that is based on outdated notions of how TNCs are structured. First, the sheer growth in number of TNCs has changed the operation of business and the resultant potential for human rights violations at the global scale. The number of TNCs – including parent companies and subsidiaries – has grown exponentially over the last fifty years. Moreover, as companies grow in size and expand overseas, the number of subsidiaries tends to increase and companies’ structures become even more complex.1 Over the last several decades, as TNCs have grown and created other corporations, they have rapidly changed form, with the emergence of complex multi-tiered corporate structures which include numerous affiliated entities that collectively conduct the business of the enterprise.2 As a result, it is difficult to determine ownership of TNCs’ various affiliated companies or to compile complete financial data on TNCs due to their complex structure, the existence of holding companies, and the fact that a subsidiary can be owned by multiple parent corporations.3 Lack of transparency surrounding ownership and existence of various TNC affiliates only exacerbates the problem.

This chapter extends examples of the second field of private mechanism: direct mediated agreement-making between concessionaires and indigenous groups. Through transnational examples from plural contexts in Russia, Suriname, Australia and Mongolia, I illustrate how concessionaires can plug and also worsen the lacunas in formal law through agreement-making, with mixed outcomes for indigenous communities. The findings suggest a link between the level of recognition afforded to groups in an underlying formal legal regime and the quality of agreement-making. In some cases, private mechanisms when integrated with the domestic legal framework, might address some of the problems that exist within the contemporary legal framework for development projects in Chapter 3, and provide clearer and fairer outcomes for communities. Other cases reveal negative practices around corporatised arm’s-length methods, behaviours and conditionalities through which integration is conducted. The debates in this chapter signal a new species of specialised commercial contract that merit regulation for their ability to speak to formal laws and principles of (un)fairness whilst sitting on the private plane.