Stop lobbying, start listening: Better policy begins with a conversation
In late June I spent a full day in Brussels, moderating a room full of speakers, panelists, policymakers and manufacturers, all there to talk about the future of European electronics. By the end of it, one thing was obvious. Everyone in that room agreed the industry matters. Almost nobody disagreed about the stakes. And yet agreement is not the same as alignment, and the gap between "we support you" and "here is what we will actually do" is exactly where good intentions tend to disappear.
By Philip Stoten
That gap is the problem worth talking about, because closing it is the difference between an industry that is listened to politely and one that helps shape the policy that governs it.
For years, the relationship between our industry and government has run mostly in one direction. The sector asks, government listens, and occasionally something happens. It is advocacy as broadcast, a wish list handed over in the hope that someone acts on it. The trouble with broadcasting is that it builds neither trust nor durable policy. Governments hear a list of demands, industry hears warm words in return, and nobody in the exchange has really been changed by it.
What I have come to believe, and what my day in Brussels reinforced, is that great policy does not come from either side making its case more loudly. It comes from getting the right people in the same room, where they listen and learn as much as they speak. Where a policymaker can explain the pressures and constraints they are working under, and a manufacturer can describe what a regulation actually means on the factory floor. Where both sides arrive ready to share their own side of the story, and equally ready to have their assumptions tested by the other. It is a conversation, not a submission followed by a verdict, and only when both parties are genuinely doing both, talking and listening, do you get policy that works and outcomes worth having.
This is the thinking behind the Global Electronics Policy Council, a new body launched by the Global Electronics Association with founding members Flex, Jabil, Plexus, TTM Technologies, TSMC and AT&S. When I spoke with their Chief Advocacy Officer Chris Mitchell about it, what struck me was how deliberately he framed the Council not as a louder lobbying voice, but a way to sit down with government and create dialogue as a genuine partner. The ambition is not simply to be heard, but to build a standing relationship where industry and policymakers think through the hard problems together. Mitchell was refreshingly honest in calling it an experiment, a hypothesis about what a better relationship between industry and government could look like.
That framing matters, because a relationship built on real conversation reaches places that lobbying never can. When government can bring its own questions and constraints to the table, and industry can respond with genuine understanding of what is politically possible, the two can build something that survives contact with reality. It turns advocacy from a transaction into a partnership, and it produces policy that neither side could have written alone.
But here is what separates a productive conversation from a merely pleasant one. A dialogue only carries weight if both sides trust what is being said, and trust, in this context, is built on evidence. This is where Mitchell's thinking confirmed and validated my own. Advocacy has to be grounded in robust, verified data. Not opinion dressed up as insight, not selective statistics chosen to win an argument, but well researched hard numbers on capacity, investment, jobs and the dependencies that run through our supply chains.
I want to be precise about the order here, because it matters. This is about a conversation supported by data, not data in place of a conversation. The numbers are not the point. The relationship is the point, and the data is what makes it credible. A spreadsheet or chart handed across the table with no relationship behind it persuades no one. But a genuine, ongoing dialogue, backed by evidence both sides trust, becomes something neither speeches nor lobbying can achieve on their own. It gives government something it can act on and defend in public, and it gives industry a way to hold government to the commitments it makes.
That is also why the role of a credible, neutral broker of the numbers matters so much, and why an organisation like the Global Electronics Association is well placed to play it. When verified figures are put on the table, figures that industry accepts and government has reason to believe, the whole exchange shifts from positional to productive. Disagreement stops being a stalemate and becomes a shared problem to solve.
I saw this play out in Brussels. The most valuable moments of the day were not the set-piece speeches, polished as some of them were. They were the exchanges where someone put a real number on the table and the room had a chance to respond to it. Those moments had a different energy, less performance and more substance, and you could feel the conversation getting sharper and more useful in real time.
The event mattered, in the end, not because everyone said the right things, but because it created the conditions for the right kind of conversation. That is the real opportunity in front of us, and it is what the Global Electronics Policy Council is set up to pursue. The industry does not need government to listen harder, and government does not need the industry to lobby louder. Both sides need to sit together, share their side of the story, listen properly to the other, and back it all with data.
Stop lobbying. Start listening. And bring the numbers to back it up.
Philip Stoten is a journalist, speaker and host specialising in the global electronics manufacturing services industry. He hosts the EMS@C-Level, MADE IN EUROPE and EMS India podcasts.
