Strategies exist for people. Somewhere between the global agenda and the village, the ministry and the team, that is easily forgotten. THAC exists to keep the people in view – those who carry a plan, and those whose trust is at stake.
Project managers and team leaders, companies and NGOs, ministries and donors, governments and international organisations – and those of us who advise them – train police and reform security sectors, build vocational centres and introduce dual education, write strategies, fund programmes and restructure teams. And from the global agenda back down to the single project, we plan it all as if people simply carried it out. But people who have lived through war, violence or years of pressure carry something with them that no plan measures – and in the end, they decide whether it works.
What we stand for
- People are actors, not target groups. Those affected by a strategy should have a say in it. International commitments point in this direction – country ownership in the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (2011), the “participation revolution” of the humanitarian Grand Bargain (2016). Our claim goes further: not only who owns a process, but whether it builds trust and healthy prosperity for those it affects.
- Trust is the currency of all cooperation. Without it, rules are not believed, money does not arrive where it should and good plans stall.
- Harm that is not addressed comes back. War, violence, injustice and years of pressure leave traces in people and in institutions. They do not disappear because a new plan begins. And it can be exploited: fear, humiliation and loss make people easier to lead, recruit and mobilise – by those who gain from fear.
- Prosperity is healthy when it rests on trust – when people and institutions can sustain it under pressure, and when it sustains life as a whole.
- Shared frameworks are worth defending. International agreements combine common norms – dignity, rights, leaving no one behind – with concrete commitments such as the Paris climate goals. Both are under pressure from narrower interests. Development can be sovereign and still rest on shared values.
How plans lose people
Most plans are part of a chain. At every link, the plan is adapted – rightly so, because a global framework has to be corrected and completed for each country, each sector and each community. But at every link narrower interests can also take over, and the shared goal is quietly lost.
| Level | What it achieves | What can get lost |
|---|---|---|
| International and multilateral – UN Agenda 2030, continental and regional agendas | Shared norms and commitments, the result of long negotiation and harmonisation. Consolidating the interests of many states is an achievement in itself. | Harmonisation has its price: what not everyone could agree on stays out, and the text sets guiding principles rather than answers. |
| National – development strategies, sector policies | Translates the framework into national priorities, budgets and laws – correcting and completing it, sometimes adding what was missing globally. | Commitments to cohesion or reconciliation may stay in the vision and never reach the targets; national interest can push the common goal aside. |
| Programmes and projects – of ministries, agencies, NGOs, donors, companies | Turns strategy into concrete action, with money, staff and timelines. | Every actor and donor brings its own agenda and logic – “our organisation first”; the shared intention is diluted or re-corrected along the way. |
| People – individuals, teams, communities | Carry it all: they teach, heal, vote, administer, protect – or they do not. | Their experiences, fears and trust – the very thing the chain depends on – are rarely part of the plan. |
A teacher who has seen her pupils killed. A police officer who no longer trusts his own superiors. A village where neighbours were on opposite sides. A team that has been through three restructurings in two years. They are not broken. They have adapted – with caution, mistrust, silence. These are reasonable responses to danger. But they stay on after the danger has passed, and they settle into how institutions work.
That is why a newly trained police unit can lose public trust within months, a vocational centre can stand half empty, an election can deepen division, and a well-funded reform can fail – not because the plan was wrong, but because by the time it reached people, it had lost sight of them.
A gap between the individual and the plan
We have psychologists for individuals and planners for systems. What lies between them – trust between groups, fear inside institutions, the memory of injustice in a community – often belongs to no one. Many people working in peacebuilding, health and public administration have seen this gap. What is still missing is a way to ask about it systematically, in every strategy and every reform.
Holding the chain together
The Relational Systems Framework (RSF) asks the same questions at every level – international, national, programme and project, and people. Because the questions are the same, the levels can be set side by side: does what the global agenda promises arrive in the national strategy, in the programme budget, in the project design – and in the lives of the people it is meant for? And does what people experience flow back up? The yardstick is not loyalty to the text above, but the people whose trust is at stake. In this way the RSF makes visible – and helps to counter – a process in which, at any level, narrower interests quietly replace the shared goal of trust and healthy prosperity.
This matters most where pressure is high. In fragile settings and crises, plans are corrected quickly, and trust, recognition and repair are the first concerns to fall away. But trust does not grow by itself out of projects – it needs deliberate measures. The RSF acts as a corrective: it puts these concerns back on the table before they are lost.
This is more than a tool for one level. It helps organisations bring their strategy and their portfolio into line. It works like a compass in high-pressure, complex settings, where plans change daily and direction is easily lost. It leads to concrete guidance at every level – as the 2024 DCAF study did for security institutions. And it can be taught: its first elements have been discussed with leaders in courses at the Institute for Peace and Dialogue in Basel. It rests on thirty years of work that connected strategy and practice – from a whole-of-government strategy for the Horn of Africa to vocational training for former fighters in Somalia.
Five questions anyone can ask
- Do people feel safe enough to take part?
- Can they rely on what is promised – also after the next election or crisis?
- Is what they have lived through acknowledged?
- Are costs and benefits shared in a way they can see?
- And when harm has been done – is there a way to repair it?
These questions apply to a global agenda as much as to a national plan, a hospital, a political party or a company under pressure. The pressures are not the same; the questions are.
Seeing familiar problems differently
Development in Africa. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the UN Agenda 2030 speak of cohesion, trust and reconciliation; national development visions take them up; programmes rarely measure them. The Africa Initiative follows this chain from the continental agenda down to concrete projects and the people they serve.
Extremism in Europe. After the attack on Berlin’s Pride parade in 2026, the debate was mostly about ideology and bans. Seen through these questions, something else appears: extremist movements offer exactly what many young people lack – clarity, recognition, belonging, a story for their hurt. Extremes on opposite sides confirm each other, and hasty public reactions can feed the loop. A ban removes a channel, not the offer. The democratic answer has to show that freedom, too, can give people something to hold on to.
Security institutions. Police officers and soldiers carry heavy experiences and also hold coercive power. Whether the public trusts them depends not only on rules, but on how institutions deal with stress, mistakes and harm – a question explored in a 2024 DCAF study of which Peter Urs Aeberhard was the primary author.
An open contribution
The RSF is meant to be shared. Anyone will be able to apply the free self-test to a strategy or programme with their own AI. It is a systematic review of what a strategy provides for – not an evaluation of its impact. It does not treat trauma and does not replace the people who carry out the work. It makes visible what is easily lost, so that it can be discussed and acted on. Whether it reliably does so is being tested, openly.
This is an invitation to journalists, practitioners, politicians, researchers, donors and anyone who has seen good plans fail: take the questions, test them, contradict them.
Peter Urs Aeberhard, THAC, Bern · The RSF and the Stress Test → · Africa Initiative → · Work with THAC → · peter.aeberhard@thac.ch