Local citizens’ perceptions of their own cities are often neglected when assessing cities’ performance. Using the perceived international image and collective pride in Hong Kong as the entry point, this article aims to discover the relationship between citizens’ trust in public authorities and urban technologies. Four angles of investigation are developed: the impact of cities’ promotion of their international image on local pride; the attitudinal and demographic characteristics of proud citizens; the linkage of local pride with public trust, and digital trust. This article uses data from a Hong Kong-based territory-wide survey in 2021 to conduct the analysis. The result suggests that public trust is an elemental factor having a positive relationship with collective pride and digital trust in Hong Kong. This article also identifies the group of citizens with the least pride. Regaining the citizen's trust is the best remedy for facilitating smart city development.

Despite the integral role of the judiciary to democracy, and the importance of judicial trust for judicial system performance, we know relatively little about the bases of public trust in this institution. How does institutional quality affect judicial trust? We explore this question in the context of Latin America, using a multilevel data set comprising survey data spanning 2001 to 2016 and country-level institutional and economic factors. We find that the effects of institutional quality on judicial trust are highly circumscribed. Factors like rule of law and corruption impact the judicial trust of only the best-educated survey respondents. Among the broader public, however, judicial trust is shaped more strongly by individuals' subjective economic and regime evaluations, as well as one's personal experiences with the judiciary.

Regulatory agencies aim to protect the public by moderating risks associated with innovation, but a good regulatory regime should also promote justified public trust. After introducing the USDA 2020 SECURE Rule for regulation of biotech innovation as a case study, this essay develops a theory of justified public trust in regulation. On the theory advanced here, to be trustworthy, a regulatory regime must (1) fairly and effectively manage risk, must be (2) “science based” in the relevant sense, and must in addition be (3) truthful, (4) transparent, and (5) responsive to public input. Evaluated with these norms, the USDA SECURE Rule is shown to be deeply flawed, since it fails appropriately to manage risk, and similarly fails to satisfy other normative requirements for justified trust. The argument identifies ways in which the SECURE Rule itself might be improved, but more broadly provides a normative framework for the evaluation of trustworthy regulatory policy-making.

Contemporary data tools such as online dashboards have been instrumental in monitoring the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. These real-time interactive platforms allow citizens to understand the local, regional, and global spread of COVID-19 in a consolidated and intuitive manner. Despite this, little research has been conducted on how citizens respond to the data on the dashboards in terms of the pandemic and data governance issues such as privacy. In this paper, we seek to answer the research question: how can governments use data tools, such as dashboards, to balance the trade-offs between safeguarding public health and protecting data privacy during a public health crisis? This study used surveys and semi-structured interviews to understand the perspectives of the developers and users of COVID-19 dashboards in Hong Kong. A typology was also developed to assess how Hong Kong’s dashboards navigated trade-offs between data disclosure and privacy at a time of crisis compared to dashboards in other jurisdictions. Results reveal that two key factors were present in the design and improvement of COVID-19 dashboards in Hong Kong: informed actions based on open COVID-19 case data, and significant public trust built on data transparency. Finally, this study argues that norms surrounding reporting on COVID-19 cases, as well as cases for future pandemics, should be co-constructed among citizens and governments so that policies founded on such norms can be acknowledged as salient, credible, and legitimate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of mobile operator data to support public policy, although without a universal governance framework for its application. This article describes five principles to guide and assist statistical agencies, mobile network operators and intermediary service providers, who are actively working on projects using mobile operator data to support governments in monitoring the effectiveness of its COVID-19 related interventions. These are principles of necessity and proportionality, of professional independence, of privacy protection, of commitment to quality, and of international comparability. Compliance with each of these principles can help maintain public trust in the handling of these sensitive data and their results, and therefore keep citizen support for government policies. Three projects (in Estonia, Ghana, and the Gambia) were described and reviewed with respect to the compliance and applicability of the five principles. Most attention was placed on privacy protection, somewhat at the expense of the quality of the compiled indicators. The necessity and proportionality in the choice of mobile operator data can be very well justified given the need for timely, frequent and granular indicators. Explicitly addressing the five principles in the preparation of a project should give confidence to the statistical agency and its partners, that enough care has been exercised in the set up and implementation of the project, and should convey trust to public and government in the use mobile operator data for policy purposes.

A study of the rights regime for environmental protection in India indicates that such protections overlap with constitutional rights guaranteed primarily to citizens or persons under the law. Contemporary jurisprudence has aggressively developed this intersectionality, declaring natural entities to be living persons with fundamental rights analogous to those of human beings. This article explores the role played by two judgments delivered by the Uttarakhand High Court – Mohammed Salim v. State of Uttarakhand and Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand – in the establishment of an effective framework for environmental protection. This is effectuated in both cases by assigning legal personality to rivers and articulating a conceptual shift from the human-centric approach. Accounting for the socio-cultural and spiritual relationships that have received legal protection, this article critically analyzes the judgments, their rationale and contributions to environmental protection. As the judgments articulate a paradigm shift in environmental protection, their effectiveness is best assessed through analyzing the frameworks created for their implementation. While the pronouncement of the Indian courts on the legal personality of rivers is an encouraging paradigm shift in environmental commitment, establishing the rights of nature was undertaken without due attention to the complexities that characterize the Indian socio-politico-religious context and to the legal consequences of bestowing vaguely contoured rights upon natural entities.

Why does public trust in traditional leaders vary dramatically across African countries? This article argues that trust in traditional leaders is higher in cases where: (1) the French colonial authority did not interfere in traditional structures and allowed leaders to operate outside of the colonial apparatus (as opposed to the British practice of augmenting the authority of traditional leaders to extract on behalf of the Crown within the colonial structure); (2) leaders in the post-independence era were not hostile towards traditional leaders; and (3) citizens believe traditional leaders play a positive role in meeting local needs vis-à-vis contemporary elected officials.

This article calls for a sociological understanding of the importance of trust to aged care. It connects existing theories of trust to empirical evidence from gerontology and nursing research. Trust is defined as a response to and management of social vulnerability. It is argued this makes trust a fundamental concept for understanding human service and social care institutions, including aged care. In light of Australia's Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, as well as generational shifts in consumer expectations and care ethics, the article highlights four distinct yet interrelated forms of trust: interpersonal, institutional, organisational and public trust. All of these forms are shown to be critical in conceptualising and evaluating the perceived trust deficit facing contemporary aged-care systems, and existing evidence shows how these forms of trust can reinforce, conflict and misalign with each other. Efforts to rebuild trust in aged care at an organisational and institutional level should ensure mechanisms facilitate rather than hinder the formation of interpersonal trust relations between individual service users, their families and aged care staff. Broader social policy reforms must also consider and address the way cultural understandings of ageing, and media representations of aged care, have diminished the public's trust in the sector, and how the cycle of scandals, reviews and piecemeal reforms contributes to this.

Regulatory activities are intended to safeguard the health of citizens by ensuring that new drug therapies meet the highest standards of safety, efficacy and quality. Recent initiatives emphasize streamlining and speeding up approval, and are intent on harmonizing standards for international competitive advantage. In Canada and the United Kingdom, a second order of evaluation is necessary in order to have the costs of a federally licensed drug covered under provincial or state health insurance programmes resulting in wider patient access to potentially cost-prohibitive products. While new therapies can get approved by federal regulatory scientists based upon acceptable evidence from data meeting the standards of safety, quality and efficacy, the determination of the formulary committees, such as the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), or the Canadian Common Drug Review (CDR), take into consideration the economic costs and benefits of the therapeutic agent. This analysis considers the technical-political-social-moral positions taken by various actors involved in legitimizing and contesting the effectiveness of cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) for treating people with Alzheimer’s disease. It examines ambiguities in the ‘norms of appropriateness and legitimacy’ of clinician researchers, and the construction and legitimization of what is appropriate in clinical research and regulatory practices.