Schweizer Dialog

The Schweizer Dialog is an initiative that invites leaders from business, government, and civil society to make explicit, public commitments about their organization’s contribution to the common good—and to submit those commitments to citizen dialogue. It is grounded in the simple but powerful insight from our GemeinwohlAtlas research: organizations are perceived as creating public value when citizens genuinely experience their contribution. This means accountability cannot be left to annual reports alone.

The Innovation
What distinguishes the Schweizer Dialog from standard transparency or ESG initiatives is the citizen dialogue layer:

1. Leaders make commitments: Participating organizations formulate specific, measurable commitments about their planned contributions to the common good. These are not generic sustainability pledges but context-specific, time-bound statements.
2. Citizens evaluate: An online platform invites citizens to evaluate the commitments across the four public value dimensions. Do they find them credible? Relevant? Ambitious enough?
3. Organizations respond: Organizations can respond to feedback, ask clarifying questions, and update their commitments based on dialogue.
4. Researchers analyze: CLIS-HSG analyzes the dialogue data to identify patterns in public expectations of organizations, informing both the academic literature and future program participants.

Why it matters
In an era of declining institutional trust, organizations that subject their commitments to genuine public scrutiny—rather than managing their image—build more durable legitimacy. The Schweizer Dialog creates the conditions for this: a structured, transparent process where leaders can demonstrate accountability and citizens can exercise their role as evaluators of organizational worth.
Grounding: The methodology is rooted in CLIS-HSG’s public value research, particularly the GemeinwohlAtlas database and the Public Value Scorecard framework.