GOVTRUST Summer School

Overview

Key Features

Creating and maintaining trust in public governance is essential for a well-functioning society, especially when this trust is more than ever under pressure in the face of grand societal challenges. Such grand societal challenges - e.g. climate change, digitalisation or global pandemics - emphasise the complexity of contemporary governance, as they require collaborative efforts from public, private and non-profit actors as well as individual citizens in multi-layered decision-making arenas.

For such complex governance systems to perform well, trust is a fundamental condition. While a certain degree of distrust between societal actors might be functional in specific instances, the recurring reports of breakdowns in trust point to significant problems for society. When trust evaporates, cooperation between citizens, private and non-profit organisations, and public actors is compromised, making an effective governance of societal transitions very hard to achieve. Governments and societal actors therefore increasingly seek ways to foster trust.

The GOVTRUST Summer School offered at Antwerp called University of Antwerp investigates a wide range of critical questions about the dynamics, causes and effects of trust and public governance from a multi-level perspective.