Dr. Kapteina at the European Forum Alpbach 2026

From 26 to 28 August 2026, Dr. Benedikt D. S. Kapteina, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Responsible Management, at TU Dresden's International Institute (IHI) Zittau, took part in the Responsible Leadership Lab of the European Forum Alpbach and spoke on its impulse panel on polarisation and depolarisation. The three day lab, titled "Business, Civil Society and Politics: Partners in Challenging Times", was funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and facilitated by Dijana Vetturelli (qohubs) and Helena Habdija.

A forum that carries weight

The European Forum Alpbach has been held annually in the Tyrolean village of Alpbach since 1945. The 2026 edition was the 81st and ran from 24 August to 4 September, under the annual motto "How Europe Wins", asking how Europe can regain its capacity to act and decide in an increasingly competitive world. Around 4,700 people from 127 countries attended the 2025 edition. Its distinctive feature is the sustained contact between spheres that usually remain separate: decision makers, researchers, business actors, cultural figures and young thinkers from across Europe work in the same place for two weeks. For 2026, EFA President Othmar Karas announced that the forum would close with a manifesto for the first time in eight decades, condensing ten concrete points from the discussions as a mandate for policymakers.

Within this programme, the Lab Days occupy a distinct position. Unlike the public stage formats, invited participants work on one specific topic in a closed setting across several days. The labs are therefore not lecture formats but working spaces with a limited number of participants, in which business, politics and civil society do not merely speak alongside one another but work through a shared question, including its conflicts. Beyond the lab, Dr. Kapteina also attended the wider EFA26 programme.

Opening impulse panel

The lab opened on 26 August with an impulse panel on polarisation and depolarisation. It was deliberately designed as a discourse format rather than a series of talks: four speakers from different sectors each put forward a short hypothesis, which was then discussed openly with the room. Dr. Kapteina contributed the research perspective. It follows from his work that companies cannot remain neutral in polarised contexts, because restraint is itself a position. What matters is therefore less the public visibility of a commitment than its structural anchoring within the company, since only there does it become clear whether a position holds up against political headwind. The questions raised in the panel served as the starting point for the work sessions that followed.

The lab

The guiding question was how actors from business, civil society and politics can address societal polarisation rather than reinforce it. Four work sessions approached it through two case studies, labour migration and climate impact adaptation, moving from observations from practice to the structural conditions of depolarising action, the knowledge and attitudes it requires, and the building of concrete cross sector alliances. Notably, the format did not reduce the contested concept of polarisation to a single working definition but treated that plurality as part of the problem. The labs 10x100 Climate Action, Urban Climate Transformation and Digital Euro ran in parallel, with exchange across topics.

Why this matters for the research

The format is relevant to this line of research for three reasons.

First, its subject matter coincides with the research field. The work studies how companies respond when democratic norms and institutions come under pressure, where gaps open between public positioning and structural practice, and under what conditions corporate restraint turns into silence. The lab addressed precisely this question from the perspective of those who have to decide it inside their organisations.

Second, access of this kind is difficult to create. Hearing executives from different sectors discuss the limits of their own agency over several days is hard to reproduce through interviews or surveys. The lab makes visible where declared responsibility meets operational, legal and political constraints.

Third, the European composition broadens the frame of reference. Contexts with considerably narrower room for manoeuvre than the German one were represented, which complements the largely German data collected so far.

For the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Responsible Management, at TU Dresden's International Institute (IHI) Zittau, the contribution therefore serves two aims: transfer between research and practice on business and democracy, and the development of European networks that carry further work on the democratic responsibility of corporations.