Three European pension funds have already pulled mandates over the divide. Canadian funds may be next to act
Asset owners are significantly more likely to back shareholder resolutions on climate, supply chain, and human rights than the asset managers they hire to vote on their behalf, and the gap is wide enough to cost some managers their mandates.
A new report from OxProx and Kaivalya Research found a consistent pattern: asset owners support ESG and shareholder-initiated proposals at materially higher rates than asset managers, who tend to vote with management across all proposal types.
The widest gap in the dataset fell on supply chain proposals, where asset owners voted in favour 49.1 percent of the time versus 19 percent for asset managers, a 30.1 percentage point divergence.
Social capital proposals, which cover human rights, customer privacy, and product safety, recorded the second-largest gap at 29 percentage points (pp).
Shareholder-led environmental proposals showed a 27.3 pp gap, climate change proposals a 23.2 pp gap, and human capital proposals a 17 pp gap.
Who initiates a proposal matters as much as its subject.
When companies filed environmental resolutions themselves, asset managers voted in favour 83.4 percent of the time.
When shareholders filed the same category of resolution, asset manager support collapsed to 20 percent, while asset owners voted in favour 47.3 percent of the time.
The report described that 63.4 percentage point internal swing as one of the most striking contrasts in the dataset, concluding that the data suggest asset managers tend to be more aligned with management teams than asset owners.
The divergence carries real consequences.
Three European asset owners terminated mandates with US managers in 2025 over voting misalignment.
Denmark's AkademikerPension ended its relationship with State Street Global Advisors in March, stating the firm's voting record did not reflect its expectations on climate and governance.
Dutch healthcare pension fund PFZW withdrew approximately €14.5bn from BlackRock in September, citing voting behaviour and BlackRock's withdrawal from Climate Action 100+.
Fellow Dutch fund PME terminated a €5.9bn BlackRock mandate in December, stating the manager's voting record was inconsistent with the fund's climate commitments and engagement expectations.
The trends extend to Canada, though the domestic disconnect is less pronounced than the transatlantic one.
A Canada Supplement to the report drew on 629,000 voting records from 28 Canadian institutional investors.
It found Canadian asset owners voted in favour of social capital proposals at a rate 22.7 percentage points higher than Canadian asset managers, with gaps on shareholder-led governance proposals (14.9 pp) and supply chain proposals (14.5 pp) also significant.
Compared against US asset managers specifically, Canadian asset owners showed even wider divergences: 39.6 pp on social capital, 34.9 pp on supply chain, and 28.4 pp on shareholder-led environmental proposals.
Smaller asset owners pushed back most aggressively.
Those with less than $100bn in assets under management voted against management recommendations 67.7 percent of the time on social capital proposals, well above the 42 to 52 percent range recorded across all asset manager tiers.
On supply chain proposals the figure was 63 percent; on shareholder-led environmental proposals, 61.4 percent.
The report attributed the divergence to structural differences between investor types.
Asset owners generally operate with longer investment horizons, more direct accountability to beneficiaries, and the capacity to weigh qualitative returns alongside financial ones.
Asset managers are typically benchmarked on risk and return, which may lead them to different conclusions on ESG votes.
The one area of near-consensus was anti-ESG proposals, where asset managers opposed 86.5 percent and asset owners opposed 91.4 percent.
All anti-ESG proposals in the dataset were filed at US companies, as those filed at Canadian companies were withdrawn before votes occurred.
The report drew on 4.57m proxy voting records from 464 institutional investors across six markets, covering 96,631 proposals across 18,793 companies for the proxy year ending June 30, 2025.
OxProx classified proposals under a SASB-aligned framework, achieving accuracy rates of 98.2 percent for proposal matching and 94.8 percent for categorization in quality testing.
