The ESG Intention-Execution Gap

At ProcureCon Asia in Singapore in 2026, one panel carried a title blunt enough to make people put their phones down: "Where are we now, and what’s stopping us? How do we move from ESG intention to execution to achieve tangible outcomes?"

The panel itself covered a lot of ground. What was more revealing, though, was what the audience asked afterward. Nobody in that room needed convincing that ESG matters. The questions weren't about whether to act. They were about why acting is so hard, even for people who already want to.

That's the actual gap. Not intention, execution. And looking at what was asked, the friction isn't abstract. It's mechanical, and it shows up in the same few places every time.

"Is anyone actually collaborating, or is each company still building its own process?"

This was the most upvoted question of the session, and it's not hard to see why. Every large buyer runs its own version of the same supplier questionnaire, asking roughly the same things in a slightly different format, on a different platform, on a different cycle. A mid-sized supplier serving a dozen customers can end up filling in a dozen near-identical surveys a year.

There's no coordination because there's no shared infrastructure to coordinate around. Each company built its own tool because each company assumed it had to. The fix isn't more meetings between competitors, it's a shared, independently verified supplier profile that every buyer can see. Build it once, and the standardisation happens on its own, because nobody needs to ask the same question twice.

"What incentives actually get suppliers to cooperate, especially on Scope 3?"

This is where most engagement programs quietly fall apart. The buyer wants data. The supplier gets a form, no explanation of why it matters to them, and no benefit for the hour it takes to fill in. Unsurprisingly, response rates sit around 20 to 30% on a good year, and plenty of programs never even get that far.

Suppliers cooperate when there's something in it for them, not out of goodwill toward their customer's sustainability report. A profile that's visible to every buyer who might want to work with them, not just the one who sent the form, changes the incentive completely. On a platform searched by buyers 90,000 times a day, showing up with a strong, verified profile is a genuine commercial advantage, not busywork.

"Are ESG requirements accidentally excluding smaller and developing-market suppliers?"

Nobody upvoted this one, but it's arguably the most important question asked. A questionnaire built for a large, well-resourced supplier assumes the respondent has a sustainability team, a data room, and time to spare. Most suppliers, especially smaller ones and those based in developing markets, have none of those things. Ask them for a climate target methodology and you'll get silence, not because they don't care, but because they don't have the infrastructure to answer in the format you're demanding.

This is where education has to be part of the model, not an afterthought bolted onto it. Suppliers need to be shown what "good" looks like on a given issue, not simply tested against a standard they were never taught. Get that part wrong, and a well-intentioned ESG program ends up filtering out exactly the suppliers who most need support to improve, while rewarding whoever already had a compliance department on staff.

The gap isn't willingness, it's architecture

Put those three questions together and a pattern shows up. Nobody in that room was asking "why should we bother with ESG." They were asking "why does doing this properly require so much duplicated effort, so little reason for suppliers to engage, and a format that only works for suppliers who already had the resources to comply."

Those are architecture problems, not intention problems. And they're solvable in roughly the same way: stop asking every supplier to answer the same set of questions from scratch for every buyer, and instead build a system where verified information is captured once, kept current, and made visible to whoever legitimately needs it; buyer, supplier, or regulator.

That's the model behind givvable's supplier engagement program. It's free for up to 1,000 suppliers, and it's built around the same three frictions this panel's audience raised unprompted: one profile instead of duplicated forms, a real incentive for suppliers to participate, and education built into the process rather than assumed.

The intention in that room was never in question. What's been missing is a system that doesn't ask people to prove it over and over again.

See how a questionnaire-free approach to supplier engagement actually works.