The Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) has formed a Stewardship Resourcing Technical Group to understand the key costs and resources involved in stewardship.

Formed of representatives from asset managers, pensions firms and data providers (full list below), the group has been created in conjunction with the Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI) to explore the challenges and barriers to allocating more to existing stewardship resources at firms, and create targets for future stewardship resourcing levels.

They will be tasked with an institutional benchmarking study to understand current processes, resources and costs including examples of best practices at asset owners and asset managers.

The findings will be presented in a guidance document made available to PRI signatories, which will include a proposed methodology of how to resource, measure, monitor and disclose on stewardship.

See also: – Stewardship must ensure last year’s asset manager commitments are met

Paul Chandler (pictured), director of stewardship at the PRI, commented: “We’re pleased to announce the members of our investor working group for our ongoing Stewardship Resourcing project today, which constitutes representatives from across the breadth of the industry. Robust and effective stewardship practices are of increasing importance for our signatories and will only be effective if resourced sufficiently.

“Our aim with this work is to develop an improved understanding of the existing resourcing of stewardship practices and analyse how this might need to evolve in light of investors’ sustainability commitments, client demands and regulatory expectations. Collaboration of this kind with our members and with key partners, including the TAI, is a key focus for us at PRI. We look forward to delivering the outputs of this work in due course.”

The project is expected to run until the end of 2023.

The working group members are: