When Harvard Business Review recently asked whether companies were scaling back their sustainability commitments, it tapped into a growing narrative: that corporate ambition is cooling, sustainability goals are quietly being shelved, and companies are retreating and even dissolving coalitions once lauded for their success.

But the reality is far more nuanced.

Contrary to the headlines, HBR found that the majority of companies remain committed to their own sustainability targets. Most are staying the course or even doubling down. They’re just doing it more quietly.

This strategic silence, or “greenhushing”, according to the authors, obscures “real value creation and operational resilience built from years of investment, commitment and progress.” While companies that retreat from the spotlight may be dodging a political bullet in the short-term, there are real costs incurred over the long run.

Stepping Back Has Broader Consequences

Multi-stakeholder initiatives in particular may be the first casualty of greenhushing because their momentum is fueled by public awareness of their progress. When companies step back from coalitions, they lose access to shared learning, collective influence, and the ability to shape system-wide change.

What companies lose when they step back from coalitions:

• Collective momentum and opportunities for pre-competitive innovation

• Shared learning and access to peers solving the same problems

• Ability to influence broader systems change at the table where standards, policies, and expectations are shaped

• Efficiency to accelerate progress through shared infrastructure

Addressing today’s sustainability challenges within food systems (e.g., advancing responsible sourcing, accelerating renewable energy, improving packaging systems, and reducing food loss) requires an inherently collective approach. Solutions to these challenges require participation across supply chains, sourcing regions, and sometimes, entire industries. In other words, no single company can solve these challenges on its own. When companies reduce their engagement with coalitions, they eliminate their access to some of the most powerful accelerators of progress.

The Rise of Quiet, Strategic Collaboration

But this movement toward greenhushing has given rise to an alternative approach to collective action. Something more akin to quiet collaboration.

An example of quiet collaboration is the Science Based Targets Network (SBTN), a global initiative guiding companies and cities to set measurable goals for water, land, biodiversity, oceans beyond just carbon. SBTN takes a notably different approach than other climate initiatives by not requiring public disclosure. Success is measured not by announcements, but by action. Specifically, companies are setting, validating, and implementing nature targets that lead to a better, more secure world.

This approach is working. Since May of 2023, SBTN has moved from pilot to adoption, signed on more than 300 member companies representing $5.5 trillion in market capitalization, and aligned with TNFD (Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures) to ensure interoperability across frameworks. The signal is subtle but powerful: progress can be made without publicity. And KPI (key performance indicator)-driven companies recognize that corporate sustainability efforts are critical to business success.

Historically, organizations involved in quiet collaboration find a way to maintain and create partnership opportunities that prioritize action. They direct resources where they matter most, towards the work itself.

Quiet collaboration can come in many different forms:

• Investing in supply chain improvements

• Deepening partnerships with NGOs or technical experts

• Collaborating with competitors and suppliers away from the spotlight

• Embedding sustainability in core strategies, not separate sustainability strategies

This quiet approach has clear benefits:

• Avoiding unnecessary political attention

• Increasing trust among partners who share a bias towards action

• Creating space for experimentation, iteration, and honest learning

Quiet collaboration could be the silver lining that maintains momentum in sustainability efforts around food systems. While widespread greenhushing makes it harder to share progress and slows the diffusion of solutions across sectors, quiet collaboration can be a powerful force to drive essential improvements in sustainability approaches.

A New Era of Sustainability Leadership

Across every sustainability challenge, progress depends on shared solutions. Companies that strategically (and sometimes quietly) collaborate, are more likely to pull ahead. So how can we capture the benefits of past coalitions in this new political climate?

Looking back on past efforts offers a useful blueprint. Even highly visible initiatives often begin quietly. Project Gigaton, now one of the most public supplier engagement efforts in food and agriculture, started behind closed doors. I led the WWF team that worked closely with Walmart and Deloitte in its earliest days to launch the retailer’s supply chain initiative. I remember sitting around a conference table, engaging in long conversations focused less on bold commitments and more on feasibility. Our focus: how to design something that could bring thousands of suppliers along, each at a very different point on the maturity curve.

Those early, trust-based discussions were followed by quiet engagement with a small group of leading suppliers to test concepts, creating the foundation for what later scaled publicly. The quiet phase wasn’t a retreat from ambition; it was what made ambition executable.

What made efforts like Project Gigaton possible wasn’t just corporate ambition; It was the presence of trusted, neutral partners who could convene the right players, hold space for honest problem-solving, and keep momentum moving even before public commitments were possible. Quiet collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intermediaries who can absorb risk, manage complexity, and create continuity when political or reputational pressures make visibility difficult.

This is where a neutral and nimble third party like the Global Impact Collective can play a critical role — facilitating alignment, managing that complexity, and helping organizations sustain momentum by focusing on human-centered strategies that bring the right people, throughout the value chain, to the table.

In a climate in which public discourse is challenging, today strong corporate leadership requires:

• Strategic alignment

• Operational integration

• Meaningful, purposeful collaboration; and a

• Willingness to keep going even when the politics get complicated.

I am hopeful that the next phase of sustainability leadership will be led by those who stay the course, build quietly, collaborate deeply, and, ultimately, deliver meaningful results.

I’m genuinely curious what others are seeing right now. Where is quiet collaboration working? Where is it falling short? And what might its future be? I’ve been asked to lead a tabletop discussion at #GreenBiz26 to explore exactly these questions, and I’d love you to join the conversation. Pull up a chair, find me at the conference, or reach out virtually. Because the next phase of sustainability leadership will depend on how well we keep working together, even when we’re doing it more quietly.