After the successful TiGRE public final conference held in Antwerp as part of the 2023 Biennial Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance (“RegGov2023”, 12-14 July 2023, University of Antwerp), TiGRE organised its 9th and final internal Consortium Meeting on 21 September 2023 (online).

The meeting was focused on the project completion items, final communication activities, and sustainability plan to coordinate upcoming scientific publications and maximise the reuse of TiGRE data & results in the long-term.

Despite TiGRE comes to an end, this highly integrated and collaborative project can be considered as a key milestone enabling to establish a new research agenda on trust & regulation.

The UNIL team, as project coordinator, warmly thank all TiGRE contributors, as well as all external participants (survey & questionnaires respondents, interviewees, focus groups participants, external advisors etc.) for their efforts and implication over the last 4 years!

The fifth and final TiGRE policy brief has just been published on the TiGRE website and the EU Horizon Results Platform.

This brief consists of an executive summary of the TiGRE white paper, translated into 10 national and regional languages from the consortium.

It aims at raising awareness and possibly influencing policy by providing best practices and policy recommendations to stakeholders in European institutions and in member states in the context of trust and regulation in the three regulatory regimes under scrutiny in TiGRE: Food Safety, Finance and Data protection.

The GOVTRUST Centre of Excellence and the research groups Politics & Public Governance and Government & Law from the University of Antwerp are jointly looking to hire 5 new team members for a four year-project on design and effects of alternative regulation and the role of trust therein.

The successful applicants will conduct research within the project "Legitimate Alternative Regulation in Regulatory Regimes" (GOBAREG). The GOBAREG project is a large research project which takes the TiGRE-related research agenda one step further.

In particular, the GOBAREG project studies how alternative forms of policy and regulation in the environmental and welfare sector, aiming for more sustainability and quality, can be designed and implemented in a legitimate way. These alternative forms of policy and regulation seek to enhance innovation and reduce compliance costs, while protecting citizens from harm.

Find out more about the project and vacancies using the following links:

• 1 PhD researcher at the Faculty of Law: link
• 2 PhD researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences: link
• 1 Postdoc researcher-coordinator​: link
• 1 ​Valorisation coordinator​: link

Application deadline: 05 October 2023

TiGRE has just released its fourth policy brief entitled "Trust in regulatory regimes and agencies: stakeholder interactions".

This new policy brief discusses two main drivers of trusts: interactions between regulatory actors and institutional design. The authors critically review how interactions on the one hand and institutional design on the other hand impact the levels of trust and regime’s performance.

Specifically, the policy brief answers the following questions and provides a set of recommendations for regulatory agencies:

• How can we understand trust and distrust relations towards regulatory agencies, and how do these differ across different government levels?
• To what extent do interactions between regulatory actors affect trust relations?
• To what extent do trust and distrust affect the performance and legitimacy of regulatory regimes?
• Does the regulatory bodies’ formal institutional design affect stakeholders and regulatees’ trust?
• To what extent do regulatory bodies implement institutional mechanisms and what is the impact on stakeholders’ trust?

You can download the policy brief by clicking here: enjoy reading!

The TiGRE team is eager to share its final results and key achievements by releasing its White Paper!

This 10-pages document provides a synthesis of the main TiGRE findings and develops scenarios and recommendations to maintain and restore trust in the area of regulatory governance.

It is available for download here.

The TiGRE project investigates under which conditions regulatory regimes are trusted and provides a comprehensive view of trust dynamics, their drivers and their political and socio-economic effects.

As the TiGRE project slowly comes to an end, its major findings and their practical implications for policy are presented in short video clips, collected in the form of a video book comprising 7 chapters with a total of 31 clips. The video book is accessible using this direct link.

The videos were recorded during the TiGRE 8th Consortium Meeting on 22 March 2023 at the University of Antwerp (except for the Chapter VI video clips): enjoy watching them!

Join us at the TiGRE final conference! It is organised as a satellite event of the 2023 Biennial Conference of the ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance (“RegGov2023”, 12-14 July 2023, University of Antwerp).

The TiGRE final conference is launched today with a keynote presentation given by Prof. Martino Maggetti (University of Lausanne, TiGRE coordinator). During the keynote, the key research findings from the TiGRE consortium’s studies of trust relationships in governance will be presented. This includes findings on if and how trust and distrust can coexist, how (dis)trust and cooperation link with the functioning of the regulatory regime, how accountability, transparency, and participation affect regulatory trust dynamics, how to explain citizens’ trust dynamics, etc.

The keynote will be followed by a panel debate with David Levi-Faur (HUJI) and Martha Baxter (OECD, TiGRE external advisor) among others, to discuss the relevance of TiGRE findings for science and policy. The panellists will get the opportunity to discuss and reflect, considering how the TiGRE findings resonate with their own work and how they would build on those findings in their future work.

In addition to the keynote presentation and panel debate, six panels covering 15 TiGRE-related papers will be organised during the three-days conference.

For more info, check out the RegGov2023 conference brochure, incl. the full programme and a dedicated section on the TiGRE final conference with an overview of TiGRE-related activities (download link).

The Utrecht School of Governance (USG) within the Utrecht University is hosting the PMRC 2023 conference on 27-30 June 2023.

The Public Management Research Conference (PMRC) is the foremost gathering of public management experts in the world. For this 2023 event, the conference organisers have prepared an exciting programme, with large number of workshops and panels sessions spread over 4 days, and expect to welcome about 300 participants!

TiGRE is nicely represented at this conference. In particular, Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen (Aarhus University) and Marija Aleksovska (Utrecht University) chair a TiGRE-related panel entitled "Managing and Organizing for Enhancing and Rebuilding Trust in Government Agencies". In times where typically "high trust" countries experience declining trust in government organisations, this panel sheds light on new approaches to investigating whether and how government agencies’ degree of independence and behaviours affect citizens and other important stakeholders' trust.

In addition, Marija Aleksovska, Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen and Thomas Schillemans (Utrecht University) will present their conference paper: "Silence speaks volumes: How does regulatory communication affect citizens’ trust?".

TiGRE has just released its third policy brief entitled "How can regulatory agencies build and repair citizens’ trust?”.

This new policy brief discusses strategies that regulatory agencies can use to foster and repair citizens’ trust in their work. These strategies are based on the findings from focus groups conducted with citizens from six European countries, and a survey experiment with Danish citizens.

Check out this policy brief to learn more on (i) the key characteristics for the regulators to be perceived as trustworthy by citizens and (ii) the courses of action to be taken by regulators to restore citizens’ trust in case of negative media coverage of incident of regulatory failure.

You can download the policy brief by clicking here: enjoy reading!

The ARENA Centre for European Studies, at the University of Oslo (UiO, TiGRE partner), is offering a PhD course on "A differentiated Europe and its implications", which will be held on 12-16 June 2023 as a hybrid event (both in Oslo and online).

For more info on the course content and learning outcome, check out the course webpage.

The course is open for students enrolled in Norwegian PhD programmes as well as international PhD candidates.

The deadline for application is extended until 14 May 2023. The application form is available here.