56th St. Gallen Symposium 2027

Theme & Programme

The St. Gallen Symposium promotes cross-generational dialogue on the most pressing issues of our time. Every year, we focus our annual main symposium, our year-round dialogue initiatives and our publications on a core theme.

This serves to inspire our cross-generational community of leaders of today and tomorrow to reflect and act upon key questions in five thematic areas, related to business, governance, sustainability, technology, and the social and generational contract.

Conditional Partnerships: Theme of the 56th St. Gallen Symposium

The global system is entering a new phase. Competition is intensifying across markets, geopolitics and technology, while trust in rules, institutions and established alliances is eroding. As uncertainty grows, states, companies and societies alike are forced to take the initiative and reassess how they work together. Openness and interdependence alone no longer guarantee stability, and cooperation is increasingly shaped by strategic interest rather than by shared assumption. Alliances are being repriced, supply chains reorganised, and solidarity extended on narrower terms. Partnerships have not disappeared, but they are becoming more conditional, more transactional and more readily revised as circumstances shift.

The shift runs through all three domains of cooperation at once: between states, in markets, and within individual partnerships.

The 56th St. Gallen Symposium will explore how partnerships can be shaped and used effectively under these more demanding conditions:

How can leaders turn growing conditionality into a source of resilience, growth and competitive advantage?
What makes partnerships thrive when access, trust and cooperation can no longer be taken for granted?

Deep dive into an age of conditional partnerships

This section examines how the terms of cooperation are being rewritten in each of the three domains where partnership matters most, and what that shift means for leaders in the decade ahead.

States

For decades, cooperation between states ran largely on trust. The old order rested on shared values and on rules enforced by a small number of large global powers. A chain of crises, and the uncertainty that came with them, has pushed states to prioritise strategic autonomy and self-reliance. Cooperation is shifting from trust to explicit terms, giving rise to more transactional dynamics but also to clearer and more deliberate partnerships.

Where existing partnerships have become volatile, states are buying back their autonomy, rebuilding their own defence, energy and supply chains after decades of outsourcing. They hedge through smaller, issue-specific clubs and bilateral deals instead of relying on established institutions, gaining flexibility and new ways to diversify risk at the cost of additional co-dependencies and tit-for-tat dynamics. For rising and middle powers in particular, selective partnerships can accelerate national development, expand access to investment and technology, and turn geopolitical competition into greater economic and political leverage.

Security itself has turned conditional, and countries are expected to invest in order to stay protected. World military expenditure reached USD 2,887 billion in 2025, taking the global military burden to its highest level since 2009. European spending rose 14 per cent in a single year, and NATO members have committed to 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security-related spending by 2035. Gulf spending, which grew only marginally in 2025, is projected to rise by as much as a fifth over the next three years.

Business

Since the height of globalisation, firms partnered largely on commercial logic, choosing the best mix of cost, capability and market access in a broadly open world. As states act on strategic autonomy and established partnerships become volatile, economic security has become a priority, and firms make partnerships conditional on resilience and proximity alongside commercial merit.

Despite rising uncertainty, global trade is not slowing down. It is reorganising around economic blocs. Goods trade grew 6.5 per cent in 2025, outpacing global GDP growth, but it increasingly flows between geopolitically aligned partners. The US-China corridor contracted by roughly USD 165 billion, ASEAN exports rose 14 per cent as displaced supply chains relocated, and semiconductors and data-centre equipment alone accounted for about a third of all trade growth.

Competitive advantage increasingly lies in managing complexity. Firms that can navigate sanctions, export controls and fragmented regulatory regimes gain access to markets, capital and strategic partners that are too complex for others to reach. Access to capital, people and technology, once largely a strategic choice, is itself turning conditional as states mandate local production in exchange for market access or restrict exports to rival economic blocs. Companies exposed to geopolitical risk hedge against uncertainty by building redundancy and vertically integrating critical resources.

AI is redrawing the rules of strategic partnership in parallel. Choosing the right operating model, use cases and technology partners is becoming a condition of future success rather than an optional bet.

People

For decades, societies leaned on a broad sense of shared belonging and on a vision of the future that, however contested, was taken for granted as net positive. Rising polarisation alongside deepening distrust of established institutions is now undermining cooperation across every form of societal organisation. Only 32 per cent of people globally believe the next generation will be better off, and around seven in ten express an unwillingness or hesitance to trust someone who holds different values.

Demographic ageing is placing growing pressure on pension and healthcare systems at a time of high public debt and competing spending needs. At the same time, AI is transforming entry-level work: employment among 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed occupations has fallen by roughly 13 per cent since 2022. Together these shifts raise new questions about how young people gain experience, build careers and access the same opportunities their parents had, and they point to the need for a new generational contract adapted to these conditions.

Societies now welcome those who add value, as residency follows skills and what people contribute, reshaping how nations compete for talent and how the young earn their place. Advancement and the freedom to self-actualise are becoming more conditional, as careers and individual economic security increasingly depend on merit, performance and the ability to create value.

Rising uncertainty makes cooperation more necessary, but increasingly conditional.

Across states, business and individuals, cooperation is being rewritten by uncertainty. Trust is no longer a stable foundation that actors can assume, but a scarce resource that must be earned, tested and reinforced through clearer terms. States are rebuilding autonomy as crises expose their dependencies. Companies are redesigning partnerships around resilience, proximity and access, not only commercial merit. People are reassessing belonging, opportunity and contribution as institutions lose credibility and economic security becomes more conditional.

This does not mean the end of partnership. It means partnerships are evolving. In a world marked by volatility, polarisation and institutional distrust, actors still need one another more than ever, but they are less willing to rely on others without safeguards. Partnerships are becoming more deliberate, more selective and more reciprocal, shaped by what each side contributes, how risks are shared, and whether cooperation strengthens autonomy rather than undermines it.

Together, these shifts define an age of conditional partnerships, where cooperation remains essential but must now be justified. The central question is no longer simply who we partner with, but under what terms and with what dependencies.

Sources

  1. SIPRI, Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2025, April 2026.
  2. NATO, Defence investment and NATO’s 5% commitment.
  3. AGBI, Gulf defence spending expected to rise by 20%, April 2026.
  4. World Economic Forum, What is minilateralism and why does it matter in 2026?, January 2026.
  5. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Middle Power Moment, January 2026.
  6. McKinsey Global Institute, Geopolitics and the geometry of global trade: 2026 update.
  7. World Trade Organization, Global Trade Outlook and Statistics, March 2026.
  8. Global Trade Alert, New Industrial Policy Observatory.
  9. Edelman, 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, January 2026.
  10. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Young workers’ employment drops in occupations with high AI exposure, January 2026.
  11. OECD, Rapidly ageing populations will continue to put pressure on pension systems, November 2025.
  12. OECD, International Migration Outlook 2025, November 2025.

Programme of the 56th St. Gallen Symposium on
“Conditional Partnerships”

Speakers at the 56th St. Gallen Symposium on
“Conditional Partnerships”