Duration: November 2023 until May 2025
The evolution of digitisation within organisations has brought digital governance to prominence as a critical task. This involves the digital transformation of decision-making procedures (termed as digitised governance), as well as the administration of these digital transformation processes themselves (known as governance of digitisation). The principal objective here is to align digital strategies and models with the organisation’s mission and values. To facilitate this alignment – which may only ever be temporarily successful – responsibility is assigned and assumed. Often, the direct evaluation of the grade of alignment is not feasible. Hence, trust and distrust, shaped through snippets of experiences, anecdotes, and the opinions of others, ranging from rumours to more formal evaluations – become crucial, even dictating the success of the system. Trust or distrust correspond to the inquiry on how responsibly the alignment has been carried out.
Determining how this alignment can be updated, assessed, and optimised remains a question. Further, identifying the optimal level for execution – whether it be individuals, groups, organisations, politics, law – and how these levels interact with each other, remains mostly undefined. The project group endeavours to investigate this relationship between digital governance, the assigned responsibility, and the role trust or distrust in this process.
Central questions for the project group include: Under what circumstances can alignment be achieved and via what means? Further, what role does the allocation of responsibility as well as the existence of trust and mistrust in these processes play in this context?
Trust, Responsibility, and Digital Governance
Regulation of AI and Blockchain Technology from a Capacity-Based Perspective
Edited Volume | December 2025
Numerous ethical guidelines and regulatory frameworks have been developed to assess and shape digital systems. However, these efforts often rest on the dubious assumption that individuals and organisations possess the necessary capacities to assess such systems in terms of justice, reliability, and other normative standards – especially given the growing complexity and corresponding opacity of many digital models. This issue is therefore of central importance to both legal and ethical debates surrounding AI and digital systems in general. The contributors to this volume propose a new approach to digital governance to enhance the capacity to evaluate and shape digital systems.
To the publisher’s page on transcript-verlag.de
Principal Investigators
Prof. Dr. Andreas Kaminski, Technische Universität Darmstadt | spokesperson | more information
Prof. Dr. Michael Leyer, Philipps-Universität Marburg | deputy | more information
Prof. Dr. Alexander Benlian, Technische Universität Darmstadt | more information
Prof. Elena Dubovitskaya, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen | more information
Dr. Marcus Düwell, Technische Universität Darmstadt | more information
Prof. Dr. Katja Langenbucher, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main | more information
Prof. Dr. Florian Möslein, Dipl.-Kfm., LL.M. (London), Philipps-Universität Marburg | more information
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Omlor, LL.M. (NYU), LL.M. Eur., Philipps-Universität Marburg | more information
Prof. Dr. Mascha Will-Zocholl, Hessische Hochschule für öffentliches Management und Sicherheit | more information
Previous events
Trust and Responsibility – Digital Governance
from a Capability-Oriented Perspective
Internal Workshop, 17 February 2025 | more about this event
Vertrauen und Verantwortung.
Digitale Systeme in fähigkeitsbasierter Perspektive
Interdisciplinary workshop, 30 September 2024 | more about this event
Dimensionen des Alignments von Werten mit digitalisierten Prozessen
Internal Workshop, 27 February 2024 | more about this event
