When Trade Policy Becomes a Stakeholder Test

Geopolitics has quietly become a core stakeholder topic. Trade barriers, export controls, subsidy races and tighter screening of foreign investments are back on the agenda in a way few companies planned for a decade ago — part of a broader shift toward protectionism that is reshaping how organisations engage with governments, regulators and the public. The renewed US tariff regime is only the most visible instance of this shift, but it offers an unusually clear case study in what such shifts demand of stakeholder management.

Switzerland's export economy has spent much of the past year living through exactly that. A shifting series of tariff decisions from Washington has pulled government relations, investor communication, legal and supply-chain teams into one fast-moving dialogue — and no single function has been able to manage it alone.

For leaders responsible for stakeholder engagement, developments like these raise an important question: How do organisations manage multiple stakeholder expectations when political decisions suddenly reshape the business environment?

The story began in 2025, when steep tariffs were threatened on Swiss exports — watches, pharmaceuticals, precision instruments, gold — putting a single decision in Washington at the centre of boardroom agendas across the country. A deal reached in November 2025 lowered the tariff rate in exchange for investment commitments. It looked like resolution. Within months, a new threat had emerged from a different direction: a proposed additional tariff tied to an investigation into supply chain practices, at a rate notably higher than the one applied to neighbouring markets. Switzerland's business associations pushed back, pointing to existing legal safeguards and international commitments, while government-to-government talks continued into the summer of 2026 with the outcome still open.

What makes the episode instructive is not the politics but the pattern — one increasingly common wherever companies find themselves on the wrong side of a protectionist turn. At least four distinct stakeholder conversations ran in parallel on the same issue.

• Diplomats negotiated directly with their US counterparts.
• Industry associations coordinated a collective, fact-based response on behalf of exporters who individually could not credibly speak for themselves.
• Investor relations teams had to explain a moving, unresolved risk to shareholders in real time.
• And a supply-chain allegation embedded in the tariff threat pulled legal, procurement and sustainability functions into a dialogue usually reserved for NGOs and rating agencies.

Companies that treat these as separate problems — a government relations issue here, an investor question there, a legal file somewhere else — are structurally slower to respond than those that see them as one stakeholder landscape. The organisations that came out of this looking prepared were the ones able to tell one consistent story to four very different audiences at the same time.

Three things stand out.

• First, cross-functional coordination is no longer optional: political engagement, investor relations, legal and sustainability need a shared view of the same file, not four separate ones.
• Second, fact-based, principled advocacy — grounded in verifiable legal and regulatory detail rather than reactive messaging — tends to carry more weight than protest alone.
• Third, and perhaps most importantly, when governments change the playing field, it is the strength of a company's wider stakeholder relationships — with investors, employees, supply chain partners and communities alike — that determines how well it weathers the shift. Those relationships cannot be built once the ground has already moved; they have to be in place beforehand, tended continuously rather than activated in a crisis.

For professionals working at the intersection of corporate affairs, sustainability, investor relations, governance or public policy, the ability to navigate these increasingly interconnected stakeholder expectations is quickly becoming a strategic advantage. These are precisely the capabilities explored in the Stakeholder Engagements course at the Executive Education of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics at the University of Zurich.

Text: Christoph Wenk Bernasconi

The Stakeholder Engagements course (2 ECTS) at the Executive Education of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics at the University of Zurich explores how organisations identify, prioritise and engage with key stakeholders, from investors and proxy advisors to NGOs, governments, supply chain partners and employees.

Participants learn how to coordinate stakeholder engagement across functions and navigate complex issues in an increasingly interconnected business environment. The course takes place on 1–2 October 2026 and forms part of the CAS in Stakeholder Management and Stewardship.