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Vanguard's newly released U.S. Regional Brief, which captures its US-specific investment stewardship activities for the 12 months ended June 30, in many ways mirrors the takeaways we reported last week from BlackRock’s annual voting report in terms of its reduced support (from 2% last season to zero) for environmental and social shareholder proposals (including anti-ESG proposals) due to their failure to address financially material risks, their overly prescriptive nature, and/or the fact that companies had already addressed the proposals’ requests. The report affirms that, the lack of support notwithstanding, Vanguard has not changed its case-by-case application of its voting policies:

The lack of support for environmental and/or social proposals this year does not reflect a change in our team’s application of the funds’ voting policies. Rather, it can be attributed to our assessment that, in each of these cases, the proposals did not address financially material risks to shareholders at the companies in question or were overly prescriptive in their requests—including, for example, proposals calling for specific greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets or third-party audits of aspects of portfolio company operations. In other instances, we did not identify a gap in the receiving company’s governance practices or disclosures that the proposal in question would address. In addition, a number of the 2024 shareholder proposals were repeats or variations of previously filed proposals that companies have taken action to address.

Vanguard also credited many companies’ enhanced disclosure of material risks, including environmental and social risks, for its reduced support.

Consistent with this season’s trends, Vanguard’s support for governance-related shareholder proposals increased to 35% this season from 17% last season.

The report also recaps Vanguard’s stewardship approach to a variety of discrete topics and shares demonstrative votes from the 2024 season.