Companies in Latin America need to maintain focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters despite a backlash against sustainability policies in the US, according to panelists speaking at the International Bar Association’s Latin America regional forum in Lima.

The panel session on Wednesday (19 March) – ‘ESG: Myth or reality?’ – explored how sustainability issues have evolved, including growing scepticism around ESG and the potential risks that could create.

“We as corporate lawyers need to play a key role in order to align companies’ ESG practices or considerations with their business strategy,” said Maria Fernanda Mierez, a partner at Beccar Varela in Argentina.

Over the past two decades ESG has evolved through five eras, according to Control Risks’ Oliver Wack, moving from the pre-2000s pre-ESG compliance era through to today, which is a post-ESG era where there is increasing controversy around ESG policies driven by conservative culture wars in the US.

All of this means companies are having to navigate a very fragmented landscape, Wack said. Some companies in this environment are not doing enough, whereas some are doing too much. Instead, companies need to find a balance between those two extremes, he added.

“Underestimating the notion or the concept of ESG because it happens to be on vote to do so is a dangerous path to go down,” said Wack. “I understand that there’s a political reason for why it’s expedient to replace ESG with resilience and take a different approach to doing it, but… ESG will not go away.”

This polarisation around ESG is a headache for companies that are operating across borders in countries with divergent policies around sustainability and social matters.

“We have contradictory messages from different stakeholders,” said Maria Isabel Echeverri from Cementos Argos in Colombia. “From investors, first they want us to be transparent and to give them information about ESG, then they don’t want us to fall too much into that.

“And then we have governments like in Colombia, where they have a focus on environmental and social issues, strengthening regulations and giving communities more and more rights every day, compared to Mr. Trump saying completely the opposite thing. So getting those different and contradictory messages is one of the main challenges that we have for doing business in Latin America and in the Americas in general.”

The panel was co-chaired by Miyanou Dufour from Hernandez & Cia in Lima and Catalina Santos from Brigard Urrutia in Bogota.

The Global Legal Post is reporting from The Road to 2030 in Latin America conference next week. Click here for further coverage.

GLP is the official publisher of the IBA Daily News, which will be distributed to delegates at the IBA’s Annual Conference in Toronto, Canada (2-7 November). Click here for more details about the IBA Daily News and here to access the IBA 2025 Annual Conference website.

For IBA Daily News advertising enquiries, email [email protected].