| 2020-2023

TiGRE - Trust in Governance and Regulation in Europe

Abstract

The demands of citizens and public authorities for data and privacy protection, security and reliability of data and information, financial stability, product safety and traceability are constantly increasing. In such a context, all actors need to trust regulatory regimes that their interests are safeguarded. An optimal level of trust is a precondition and a consequence of well-functioning of regulatory policy making. This is exemplified by recent scandals, such as major data leakages and privacy-threatening behaviour by Facebook and Google for instance. Indeed, these scandals created threats for citizens’ trust in regulatory regimes, which operate across different levels of governance for carrying out regulatory policies. In this context, the analysis of trust relationships among a variety of actors involved in these regulatory regimes has thus become essential to draw a more encompassing picture of trust dynamics and understand their drivers as well as their political and socio-economic effects.

Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research programme, the “Trust in Governance and Regulation in Europe” (TiGRE) project has the ambition to explore trust relationships in three high value sectors: Finance, Food Safety and Communication & Data Protection. It will analyse the conditions under which their regulatory regimes are trusted at different levels of governance such as regional, national and European. To that extent, TiGRE will examine how actors involved in regulation (such as administrative bodies, politicians, courts, firms, business, consumer groups and citizens at large) interact with each other. To achieve these goals and provide a comprehensive understanding of this phenomena, a variety of methods will be employed, such as questionnaires for large-scale surveys, case studies, focus groups, experimental studies and media content analysis among others. The TiGRE project partners will target and be in regular contact with European stakeholders, representing a broad range of regulatory actors. To connect research with policy and practice, the TiGRE project will provide indicators to detect signals of decreasing trust as well as scenarios on consequences of decreasing trust.

For more information on TiGRE, please visit: https://www.tigre-project.eu

Funding

  • Horizon 2020 - Societal Challenge 6 'Europe in a changing world - Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies' - GOVERNANCE-01-2019 'Trust in governance'

Project team

UAntwerp is a core partner in the TiGRE project, with involvement of several GOVTRUST members.

  • University of Lausanne, Switzerland - coordinator
  • University of Antwerp, Belgium - GOVTRUST Centre of Excellence (Koen Verhoest, Frédérique Six, Patricia Popelier, Esther van Zimmeren, Monika GlavinaBjorn Kleizen)
  • Aarhus University, Denmark
  • Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
  • German University of Administrative Sciences, Germany
  • Kozminski University, Poland
  • Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, Spain
  • University of Oslo, Norway
  • Utrecht University, The Netherlands