In the past the Netherlands was known for its lenient approach towards anticompetitive behaviour. This slowly changed during the 1990s, and the Netherlands turned into a paradise for competition law litigation. The Dutch Competition Authority (ACM) has multiple tools to combat anticompetitive behaviour. The competition law rules should nowadays be clear for undertakings. Nevertheless, the ACM has over the years been a bit more lenient in sectors where competition law was recently introduced. Fines are an important means to enforce the competition law rules, but the ACM seems to invest much in informal enforcement tools. The ACM is strengthening informal enforcement by, for example, creating guidance papers on different important topics. Informal enforcement can be an efficient way to respond to anticompetitive practices. Compliance with procedural and fundamental rights of undertakings should be safeguarded though. Furthermore, at this point in time, informal enforcement is still conducted on an ad hoc basis and therefore seems not to be based on a clear vision.

In this Chapter, we investigate the availability (or not) of strategies to enforce shareholder stewardship and set out a simple enforcement taxonomy based on three dimensions: the nature of the norm enforcer (self-enforcement/third-party enforcement); the nature of the enforcement mechanism (formal/informal) and the temporal dimension of enforcement (ex-ante/ex-post). We examine the enforcement of shareholder stewardship across 25 jurisdictions and find that informal enforcement by market actors is the preferred option. Looking forward, we sketch the broad contours of an optimal stewardship enforcement framework based on our taxonomy. We caution against administrative sanctions and support instead a facilitating role for (quasi-)public in two ways. First, (quasi-)public actors can facilitate stewardship enforcement via membership/adherence sanctions taking place within stewardship networks (e.g. public tiering) or informal mechanisms (e.g. reputational mechanisms and private dialogue). Secondly, where ultimate investors have suffered damages from deficient stewardship disclosure, we support the introduction of a facilitating system of civil claims that can serve both restorative-compensatory objectives and public interests. We also advance the importance of promoting enforcement by market and social actors. Our enforcement framework is not intended to be applied in a uniform fashion around the world. Rather its multi-actor, multi-modal and temporally continuous fashion can adjust to any national or supranational framework.