Trust, Transparency and Transnational Lessons from COVID-19

Abstract

The article engages in an exercise in reflexivity around trust and the COVID-19 pandemic. Common understandings of trust are mapped out across disciplinary boundaries and discussed in the cognitive fields in the medical and social sciences. While contexts matter in terms of the understandings and uses made of concepts such as trust and transparency, comparison across academic disciplines and experiences drawn from country experiences allows general propositions to be formulated for further exploration. International health crises require efforts to rebuild trust, understood in a multidisciplinary sense as a relationship based on trusteeship, in the sense of mutual obligations in a global commons, where trust is a key public good. The most effective responses in a pandemic are joined up ones, where individuals (responsible for following guidelines) trust intermediaries (health professionals) and are receptive to messages (nudges) from the relevant governmental authorities. Hence, the distinction between hard medical and soft social science blurs when patients and citizens are required to be active participants in combatting the virus. Building on the diagnosis of a crisis of trust (in the field of health security and across multiple layers of governance), the article renews with calls to restore trust by enhancing transparency.

Measuring global pandemic governance: how countries respond to COVID-19

“…Providing assurance through assessment and transparency carried out by each government is considered of the utmost importance in the process of handling COVID-19. This is done to increase public trust in the government's efforts to tackle the pandemic (Cole et al, 2021;Song & Lee, 2016;L. Zhang et al, 2020).…”

Trust in Institutions, Not in Political Leaders, Determines Compliance in COVID-19 Prevention Measures within Societies across the Globe

“…National political leader trust is more influenced by the interpersonal and political dimensions, while trust in public health agencies is more comprised of the institutional trust dimension, a dimension that may actually be strengthened when it is not politicized [ 16 , 39 ]. Additionally, transparency has been found to have sometimes mixed [ 35 , 40 , 41 , 42 ], but usually positive effects on both institutional trust and political leader trust in public health crises [ 10 , 12 , 43 , 44 , 45 ]. Given these considerations, we build our study on the concept that trust towards agencies and trust towards political leaders are fundamentally different types of trust, and possibly affected by transparency in different ways.…”

Enacting Economic Resilience: A Synthesis of Economic and Communication Frameworks

“…However, despite the expansive utility of such a framework for exploring non-normative contexts (e.g., businesses and non-profits), organizational communication scholars have neglected to explore the organization of grander systems such as the government and economy using these tools or to engage with economic scholarship in meaningful ways (Wildman 2008;Sparviero 2010). Along the same lines, despite the growing body of economic literature employing communication concepts, such as transparency (Cole et al 2021), narrative (Nyman et al 2021;Shiller 2019), and uncertainty (Tuckett et al 2020), relatively few engage with the extensive history of work in these areas by communication scholars (e.g., Berger and Calabrese 1975;Boje 1991;Deetz 1992;Fisher 1984Fisher , 1989. This lack of engagement has been detrimental to both disciplines, but through this review, we aim to center the social processes of communication and organization as a means of exploring economic resilience and developing avenues for the theoretical, methodological, and practical advancement of both disciplines.…”