Lobbying does not begin when a company walks into a minister’s office. It begins upstream in the policy discourse when evidence gets funded, ideas are amplified, and voices appear to speak for the public.
This new initiative – UP/STREAM – turns attention to this least visible, yet highly consequential layer of corporate political engagement. This type of upstream influencing operates through three main channels:
of think tanks and academic research
and media collaborations
via financial and organisational support to citizen groups, grassroots coalitions and social-media influencers.
Together these efforts pre-structure the policy debate long before any direct lobbying contact takes place. And they remain almost entirely invisible, unmeasured and ungoverned.
UP/STREAM aims to make this layer of influence more visible, measurable, and governable. It aims to establish the first comprehensive, structured empirical basis for assessing corporate upstream political engagement in Europe and to put credible governance options on the table. The geographic focus is the European Union – EU institutions and selected member states – with comparative reference to OECD countries.
It works on four fronts:
proposing institutional mechanisms capable of governing this space without chilling legitimate corporate support for research and civil society.
The evidence that their practice matters is scattered but robust:
Fossil-funded university energy centres frame natural gas systematically more favourably than centres without that funding – a finding drawn from sentiment analysis of over 1.1 million sentences across 26 US centres (Almond et al., 2022)1 Almond, D., Du, X., & Papp, A. (2022). Favourability towards natural gas relates to funding source of university energy centres. Nature Climate Change, 12(12), 1122–1128. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01521-3.
Trade associations engaged on climate issues spent roughly three times as much on advertising and promotion as on lobbying between 2008 and 2018 (Brulle & Downie, 2022)2Brulle, R. J., & Downie, C. (2022). Following the money: Trade associations, political activity and climate change. Climatic Change, 175(3), 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03466-0.
Of the ads returned on 78 climate-related Google search terms, more than one in five – over 1,600 in all – were placed by companies with significant fossil-fuel interests (McIntyre, 2022)3McIntyre, N. (2022, January 5). Fossil fuel firms among biggest spenders on Google ads that look like search results. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/05/fossil-fuel-firms-among-biggest-spenders-on-google-ads-that-look-like-search-results.
Three-quarters of government affairs professionals now regard influence exercised through grassroots groups as increasingly impactful (FiscalNote, 2023)4FiscalNote. (2023). The state of government affairs & advocacy — 2023 industry report. https://fiscalnote-marketing.s3.amazonaws.com/FN120222-State-of-GA-Advo-Report-2023_v7.pdf
Policy-makers appear increasingly aware of upstream influence: Roughly a quarter of parliamentarians surveyed name biased evidence and data as a main risk arising from efforts to influence policy while 78% rate academic papers as an important source for policy formulation (OECD, 2021)5OECD. (2021). Lobbying in the 21st century: Transparency, integrity and access. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/c6d8eff8-en Dieter Zinnbauer (PhD).
UP/STREAM completes The Good Lobby’s past and present coverage of the corporate political footprint.
benchmarks how sustainability data providers treat direct lobbying
assessed the governance and disclosure of indirect lobbying through business association
UP/STREAM explores how companies shape policy and public opinion behind the scenes, long before traditional lobbying begins.
now addresses the upstream shaping of evidence, ideas and discourse, and links all three into a single analytic framework