The ability of business to meaningfully engage with those groups and individuals who it affects, and is affected by – its stakeholders – is a critical component in humanity’s pursuit of net zero, sustainable development for all. This chapter explores and unpacks stakeholder approaches to corporate sustainability and responsible business.

It starts off by framing the big picture of why a stakeholder approach – one that accounts for the interdependencies between business, society and nature – is increasingly pivotal during the uncertain and ambiguous times of the 2020s. Following on, the chapter introduces the core features of a stakeholder approach to corporate sustainability. The third section looks at different stakeholder models. It illustrates stakeholder model development in business settings over time, as well as the influence of the cultural context, such as the one found in the Nordic countries, to foster a stakeholder mindset in business.

The fourth and final section considers stakeholder theory in the age of sustainability, with particular coverage given to the implications of new Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for successful stakeholder engagement strategies.

Weaved in throughout this chapter, and parallel to the online case study, are a number of examples designed to illustrate how a stakeholder approach manifests in the ‘real world’.

The goal of this chapter is to examine whether the stewardship code, which emanated in circumstances that are specific to the United Kingdom (UK), is capable of transposition to jurisdictions such as India that experience different corporate structures as well as legal and institutional mechanisms. This paper cautions against the wholesale adoption of a UK-style stewardship code in India due to the specific factors that are at play in that jurisdiction. At least three reasons necessitate such an approach. First, while the prominence of institutional investors in the UK in the context of companies with dispersed ownership inspired the UK-style stewardship code, the roles and challenges that institutional investors experience in India in the context of concentrated shareholding are considerably different. Second, the goals of stewardship vary from the UK, where the focus is on the long-term financial sustainability of beneficiaries of institutional investors, to India, which follows a pluralistic stakeholder approach to corporate law. Third, the traditional mode in the UK of using a code-based soft law approach to implementation of stewardship is unsuitable to the Indian circumstances that steadfastly rely on mandatory rules in the form of hard law in the corporate arena.