Who gets to shape cooperation? Reflections from Diplomacy Day, Locarno Film Festival 2026
News
Publish date: August 11, 2026
Who gets to shape cooperation? Reflections from Diplomacy Day, Locarno Film Festival 2026
News
Publish date: August 11, 2026
“Before you can change systems, you need to change relationships.”
With that message, Supattira Patti Rodboontham, Director of Hub Southeast Asia at the Wyss Academy for Nature, brought one of the central questions from the Wyss Academy’s work in Thailand to Diplomacy Day 2026 at the Locarno Film Festival on 10 August 2026: how to build cooperation with people who live with the challenges, rather than around predefined solutions.
Drawing on the Wyss Academy’s work in Nan Province, Thailand, Patti argued that complex social and environmental challenges cannot be addressed through predefined solutions. Instead, they call for listening first, understanding the system, and creating space for people living with the challenges to help shape the response. As Patti put it: “Understand the system before prescribing solutions.”
Throughout Diplomacy Day, speakers from diplomacy, philanthropy, civil society, business, academia, and culture reflected on how international cooperation can better account for relationships, agency, and different perspectives.
Rethinking how we cooperate
The Wyss Academy was proud to co-convene this year’s Diplomacy Day alongside Fondation Botnar at the Locarno Film Festival, with support from the Club Diplomatique de Genève. The program was built around the challenges facing international cooperation and the need to explore different ways of working across sectors and institutions.
Opening the event, Locarno Film Festival CEO Raphaël Brunschwig reflected on cinema’s role in diplomacy: not as a solution to political problems, but as a space to listen, understand complexity, and see the world from another perspective. He added that cooperation is never only about funding; it also depends on relationships, knowledge, trust, and enabling people to tell their own stories.
Tatjana von Steiger, Head of Global Policy Outreach at the Wyss Academy, picked up that question of perspective and agency. She called for solutions that reflect different parts of society and different geographies: solutions that are “locally rooted, not imported”. She also invited participants to rethink cooperation by asking whose stories get to shape it, pointing to relationships among people and with nature as a foundation for cooperation that lasts.
Andrea Studer, CEO of Fondation Botnar, argued that changing the language around cooperation is not enough if institutions continue to work in the same way. “Rethinking will not be enough,” she said. “We need to change how we work. We need also to partner differently and we have to fund differently.” For philanthropy, this also means accepting a different kind of certainty: creating space for communities to shape outcomes and have greater control over how change unfolds.
Listening before prescribing
Patti was one of four speakers in the session “Reimagining Cooperation Today: Four Practical Perspectives.” Drawing on more than 20 years in international development, she reflected on how development organizations can arrive in countries or communities with their own assumptions, priorities, and predefined solutions.
“To what extent do we really ask what the locals need?” she asked.
At the Wyss Academy, she said, the work begins with questions rather than answers. Social, economic, and environmental challenges are interconnected and cannot be addressed through a single project or predefined solution. Instead of defining success in a landscape in advance, the questions that arise are: What challenges matter most here? Where are the gaps? And how can the Wyss Academy and its partners support communities in shaping change themselves?
Patti illustrated this through the co-design process in Nan Province in northern Thailand, an important watershed and a source of water for millions of people downstream. The process has brought together stakeholders working on forests and people across the province. Some, Patti noted, had been working in the same area without previously meeting or speaking to one another.
For Patti, bringing people into the same conversation is an essential first step. “You need to listen. You need to understand the need, and you need to build relationship.” In complex landscapes, changing how people and institutions relate to one another can be as important as the technical solutions themselves.
This session also featured Dr. Nana Asantewa Afadzinu, Executive Director of the West Africa Civil Society Institute; Kojo Annan, entrepreneur and Board Member of the Kofi Annan Foundation; and Janine Kervegant, former Impact Editor at The New Humanitarian.
The wider conversation
After the four pitches, participants moved into small working groups to consider a shared question: If we had to redesign international cooperation today, what would it look like? The session created space for participants to compare experiences and test some of the ideas raised earlier in the afternoon.
The plenary discussion then brought together Itonde Kakoma, President and CEO of Interpeace; Dr. Sandrine Dixson-Declève, former President of the Club of Rome; and historian, philosopher and author Philipp Blom. Their conversation widened the lens to the institutions and power structures that shape global cooperation – touching on trust, systems change, privilege, and the relationships within institutions themselves. Blom, in particular, called for a closer look at how privilege shapes those relationships and whose perspectives carry weight.
The afternoon concluded with a keynote by Professor David Lewis, who explored how culture and storytelling can sustain cooperation by opening space for different ways of understanding shared challenges and imagining how to respond to them.
Across the different sessions, several questions returned: who shapes decisions, whose knowledge counts, and what kinds of relationships allow cooperation to last? There was a call for institutions to listen, to assume shared responsibility, and work with those closest to the challenges at hand.
Beyond the PalaCinema venue
For the Wyss Academy, Diplomacy Day touches on a question that also runs through our work: how do we create change in ways that are grounded in place, informed by different forms of knowledge, and carried by the people and institutions involved?
Systems transformation does not happen through technical solutions alone. It also depends on the relationships that allow people to listen, challenge assumptions, and act together over time. That is what makes convenings like Diplomacy Day valuable. They create space for perspectives that do not always meet, and for ideas to be tested across sectors rather than within them.
We are grateful to Fondation Botnar and the Locarno Film Festival for the partnership behind this year’s Diplomacy Day, and to the speakers and participants who brought their experiences, questions, and perspectives into the room. We are proud to help create a space where cooperation itself can be examined, not only in terms of what we want to achieve, but also who gets to shape the path toward it.