Transparency Practices and Trust in Shared Governance
In-progress research on how budget transparency practices shape faculty and staff trust in institutional decision-making.
Transparency is frequently promised and inconsistently defined. This working paper examines what faculty and staff actually mean when they describe an institution's budget process as open, and how those perceptions relate to trust in governance more broadly.
Early findings suggest that volume of disclosure matters far less than legibility and timing. A brief, well-explained summary released before a decision builds more trust than an exhaustive dataset published afterward.
A second pattern concerns reciprocity. When consultation demonstrably changes an outcome — even a small one — participants extend considerably more good faith to subsequent decisions they dislike.
The paper proposes a set of transparency practices institutions can adopt without exposing sensitive personnel or negotiation detail, and outlines a measurement approach for tracking their effect over time.
Interested in this work? Institutions, colleagues, and conference organizers are welcome to start a conversation.
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