Rebuilding Trust and Governance: Towards Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT)

The report argues that the Fourth Industrial Revolution—characterized by cyber-physical fusion and AI—has rendered traditional, rigid, rule-based governance ineffective, leading to social distrust. To counter this, it introduces the 'Trust Governance Framework,' which defines the relationship between trust, trustworthiness (objective evidence), and governance. The authors advocate for 'agile governance'—a continuous, multistakeholder process of analysis, design, and evaluation—and the creation of 'trust anchors' to reduce the cost of verifying trustworthiness. The framework emphasizes a shift toward goal-based rules and 'by-design' approaches to ensure that values like privacy and security are embedded in technology, ultimately supporting the Japanese government's 'Data Free Flow with Trust' (DFFT) initiative.

• The Fourth Industrial Revolution creates a 'cyber-physical fusion' where digitized data processed in cyberspace influences physical spaces at unprecedented speeds, and systems become a 'system of systems' managed by multiple agents, making outcomes difficult to anticipate.
• Traditional rule-based legal governance is too rigid and slow to react to the rapid changes of the digital age, often taking years for legislative amendments while the external environment evolves.
• AI, particularly deep learning, presents a unique governance challenge because it learns inductively and lacks the human ability to explain the rationale for its decisions or take accountability for negative effects.
• The 'Trust Governance Framework' defines trust as a trustee's expectation that an actor will behave positively, while 'trustworthiness' consists of the objective properties or facts suggesting that an entity will behave as expected.
• Trust is structured as a chain where trust in a service provider depends on the trustworthiness of that provider, which in turn is ensured by a governance entity, which itself must be trusted through a higher level of governance.
• Agile governance is proposed as a multistakeholder, continuous process involving environment and risk analyses, goal setting, system design, operation, evaluation, and improvement, rather than relying on fixed rules.
• The report identifies four key roles for governments in the post-Fourth Industrial Revolution era: designing participatory governance systems, encouraging private sector cooperation, forming and transmitting their own trustworthiness, and coordinating international rule-making.
• Governance means should be systematically combined, moving from detailed specifications to a 'goal-based approach' and incorporating 'by-design' methods where values like security and privacy are embedded into the system life cycle.
• Trust anchors are necessary to lower the cost for individuals to verify trustworthiness by communicating evidence of sources of trustworthiness and proving it to trustees.
• The 'Data Free Flow with Trust' (DFFT) initiative seeks to promote safe, reliable cross-border data sharing to prevent the creation of barriers to data flow that some believe are necessary for protection.

APA

World Economic Forum (2021). Rebuilding Trust and Governance: Towards Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT). http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_rebuilding_trust_and_Governance_2021.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Rebuilding Trust and Governance: Towards Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT). 2021. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_rebuilding_trust_and_Governance_2021.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Rebuilding Trust and Governance: Towards Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT) |date=March 2021 |url=http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_rebuilding_trust_and_Governance_2021.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2021rebuilding, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Rebuilding Trust and Governance: Towards Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT)}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2021}, month = mar, url = {http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_rebuilding_trust_and_Governance_2021.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }