Pitt’s Center for Governance and Markets received a $1.8M grant from the John Templeton Foundation

A team led by the Center for Governance and Markets (CGM) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public and International Affairs will examine how societies can respond to the erosion of trust in the public sector - in the U.S. and around the world. The three-year project, launching Oct. 1, received a $1.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to bring new ideas into the study of public governance, rebuild scholarship, and train the next generation of scholars and practitioners.

"Revitalizing Public Governance: Civic Leadership and Human Agency to Build Trust and Flourishing" is co-led by CGM Director Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Professor of Public and International Affairs Ilia Murtazashvili along with Paul Dragoș Aligică, KPMG Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest and Senior Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili and Aligică recently completed a Templeton-supported project exploring how societies govern deep differences in values.

"Trust in government has been falling for 60 years, in the United States and across much of the democratic world. That is one of the central facts of our time, and the fields that study and teach public governance have not yet found their answer to it," Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili said. "Much of the most interesting recent thinking about why government struggles to deliver has come from outside the academy, from the abundance movement, from journalists and from practitioners. This project asks how scholarship can inform this moment: what public administration and public policy already know that could help, and what we still need to learn."

The project treats the loss of trust as a problem of governance rather than messaging. It will study how public institutions earn confidence by delivering results, drawing on local knowledge, and giving citizens and public servants real agency in solving problems. It will also widen the conversation, inviting perspectives that the field has not always made room for and that some observers believe it needs. "Our goal is to get more people involved," Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili added. "That means scholars, practitioners and students from every part of the field, and people who do not yet see themselves in it, working on the same question."

Marla Ripoll, interim dean at the School of Public and International Affairs, added that the project "will build durable intellectual infrastructure through new scholarship, workshops, open-access research and teaching resources, small research grants and mentorship for early-career scholars - bringing hundreds of speakers, scholars and convenings to Pitt. This timely award represents a great opportunity to promote SPIA's standing as a leader in public policy and public administration, both nationally and worldwide."

The project will bring together researchers and practitioners across public policy, public affairs and public administration to explore how civic leadership and human agency can contribute to more effective and trusted governance.

Over the three-year project, CGM will support new peer-reviewed research and produce policy briefs, case studies, two open-access books, curricula and other teaching resources. The work will include providing small research grants and mentorship opportunities to early-career scholars. Through workshops, public lectures and conferences, the initiative will bring together scholars, practitioners and public leaders regionally, nationally and internationally, while building partnerships with organizations such as the American Society for Public Administration and the American Political Science Association among several others. The intention: to generate new research; to construct lasting infrastructure for the study, teaching and practice of public governance to better equip future leaders; to bring a wider range of voices into a field that benefits from them; and to strengthen the connection between academic research and people working in the field.

"The classical liberal tradition - built upon insights about the role of dispersed and tacit knowledge in complex societies, the capacity of local communities to solve problems closest to them, the dangers of ignoring secondary and unseen consequences, and way that order can emerge spontaneously from the actions of manifold individuals - is a rich toolbox of concepts and methodologies for contributing to better public administration and better public policy," said Greg Wolcott, director, individual freedom and free markets, with the John Templeton Foundation. "We are thrilled that the CGM team is taking a serious look at how to engage these insights fruitfully in their scholarship and pedagogy."