Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP): Democracy, Governance and Trust (DGT)

Funding is available to transnational consortia for humanities and social sciences projects focused on questions linked to democracy, governance and trust.

The Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP) is a collaboration between select humanities and social science funders in Europe and the Americas. The Platform aims to enhance transnational research collaboration and has identified, with the help of the social sciences and humanities research communities, a series of common challenges and strategic priority areas where such collaboration will bring added value.

T-AP has launched a call for proposals, titled Democracy, Governance and Trust (DGT), which seeks to understand how democracy, governance and trust are crucial in taking on both short-term and long-term challenges and how they are also themselves a focus of the discontent and disruption that many societies face. The call will support research that adopts diverse methodological, disciplinary and cross-national perspectives in relation to these topics, their causes and their dynamics, and builds capacity to develop creative responses to these challenges, maximising opportunities to strengthen democracy, governance and trust for the benefit of all in society.

The call invites interdisciplinary and innovative research proposals that can make advances in one or several of the following ways:

• Improve and innovate the conceptualisation and theorisation of democracy, governance and trust.
• Address topics aimed at collective responses to global challenges for democracy, governance and trust.
• Empirically define and describe the opportunities, challenges and crises relevant to democracy, governance and trust from a historical, contemporary or prospective perspective.
• Offer diverse methodological, disciplinary and cross-national perspectives on these topics.
• Study or test interventions (ie improving outcomes) aimed at enhancing democratic processes, improving governance and rebuilding trust in formal and informal political systems, economic structures, cultural associations, education and public institutions.
• Advance knowledge through co-developing work programmes with communities, educators and key stakeholders in civil society, education and government.
• Examine the role of digital media, tools and technologies in eroding or strengthening democracy, governance and trust and the roles of education, cultural institutions and the law in shaping, facilitating and restraining this role of digital media.

T-AP has identified nine cross-cutting themes for this call:

1. Concepts, understandings and models of democracy, governance and trust.
2. Education.
3. Media, information and communication.
4. Economies and economic systems.
5. Identities, discrimination, marginalisation and inequalities.
6. Ecosystems and environments.
7. Epistemologies, knowledge and expertise.
8. History and culture.
9. Power, authority and conflict.

Detailed descriptions of each theme may be found in the call document. The call encourages candidates to consider how these themes may be linked.

The research conducted may explore one or a combination of the following: theoretic, developments, qualitative and/or quantitative data, big data, survey, laboratory and field experiments, historiographical and interpretive traditions, cross-national and cross-regional data analyses, multi-level analysis, textual data mining, systematic reviews, meta-syntheses and meta-analyses, longitudinal surveys, case studies, ethnographic interviewing and observation, participatory collaborative enquiry strategies, cultural productions, simulations. Other methodologies or approaches relevant to the theme of democracy, governance and trust may also be considered.