TAI Weekly

TAI Weekly | AI Can Generate Content. It Can't Generate Trust | 7 July, 2026

By TAI (Role at TAI)
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TAI Weekly

July 7, 2026

Dear readers,

We start this week with some good news that the Kenyan government and the World Bank have agreed a 97 billion Kenyan shilling loan facility to back reforms aimed at making government institutions more transparent and accountable. It remains to be seen if this might help restore public faith in financial management and a commitment to clamp down on corruption.

Staying positive, one of the recommendations of a Civicus convening caught our eye. Communicators working to strengthen civic action in Asia urged adoption of hope as a “strategic tool”. 

Read on for all the news, research, funder guidance, jobs and events ranging from tax revenues to dignity in the energy transition to new lines of anti-corruption research to human-led (not machine-led) accountability.

TAI team

What's New

Earth Journalism Network “Dark Side of the Boom” investigation into resource-intensive digital technologies has just won a Society of Publishers in Asia Excellence in Reporting on the Environment award, as well as a 2026 Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia's “citation for journalistic innovation.” Worth the read. 

A recent OECD blog explores how governments are strengthening the fight against transnational bribery through joint investigations and coordinated enforcement. Authors showcase the growing use of multijurisdictional resolutions to align sanctions and hold companies accountable across borders.

Matias Bianchi argues that extreme wealth concentration poses a direct threat to democracy by expanding political influence, lobbying power, and control over public debate. His essay in El País and his new book, “Estado o Algoritmo” (both in Spanish), call for bringing billionaire power back under democratic oversight. 

Alejandra Meneses and Andrea Ordoñez examine how Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean can work together to advance green industrialization in “The Afri-LAC Opportunity on Green Industrial Policy”. Their four principles approach includes a focus on human dignity. Read with Ayenat Mersie’s piece on whether the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will make it harder for developing countries to move up the value chain. 

Ekemini Simon shares an assessment of Nigeria's Host Community Development Trusts that found major governance weaknesses and persistent gender inequality in the management of oil revenues. The revelations raise concerns about transparency and whether resource wealth is reaching affected communities.

Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz examines how crony capitalism is fueling an oligarchic order in the United States, while Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg describe what they see as the systematic pillaging of the US state. Both Project Syndicate pieces argue that political power and private wealth increasingly reinforce one another at the expense of democratic accountability.

Devi Pillay synthesizes insights from Governance & Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI ACE) on how professional enablers facilitate kleptocracy, grand corruption, and state capture while helping conceal illicit wealth. Drawing on a decade of research, she identifies how these actors operate and which policy responses have proved most effective.

The OECD reports that tax revenues increased as a share of GDP across the Asia-Pacific region in 2024, driven by stronger income tax collections as exports, investment, and tourism boosted economic growth.

The TAI Collaborative is set to release “Mined the Gaps”, a new report by Sefton Darby that challenges the "zero-sum" narrative of the mineral rush. It argues that investing in building community trust and effective regulation aren't obstacles to speed—they are the essential enablers of a successful energy transition. Stay tuned for the full report coming soon!

From Our Members

OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS: Writing in Spanish for EL PAÍS América Colombia, Felipe Cala, OSF Special Advisor, argues that the global expansion of the far right is neither an accident nor a fluctuation. He locates the middle classes as the arena where this struggle is being waged, mobilized above all by the fear of downward mobility.

FORD FOUNDATION: To mark 250 years since the United States' founding, the foundation asked a wide range of leaders, thinkers, creators, advocates, and practitioners to share a reflection on what it means to safeguard democracy and what the next 250 years should look like. Kicking off the series, Ford president Heather Gerken reflects on what democracy requires of us now.

HEWLETT FOUNDATION: London Swift has joined the Foundation as Program Officer with its Economy and Society Initiative, where she will manage a portfolio of grants advancing ideas that make the economy better suited to addressing society's biggest challenges. 

HILTON FOUNDATION: Is now accepting nominations for the 2028 Hilton Humanitarian Prize, which awards three million dollars in unrestricted funding to an organization advancing the collective progress of humanity.

ESSENTIAL READING:

Researcher Dieter Zinnbauer argues that while some anti-corruption debates have reached a dead end, the field continues to evolve through new lines of research. He points to emerging work on corruption by inaction, satellite-based detection, the role of short sellers in exposing misconduct, and the misuse of anti-corruption tools themselves as promising areas for future research.

TOOLS AND TRENDS FOR FUNDERS

Monica Roas, founder and director of Puentes, argues that today's world confuses connection with connectivity and disconnection with isolation. She urges funders to move beyond fragmentation and competition toward co-responsibility, care, and stronger collaboration. The essay is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

This piece from the Center for Effective Philanthropy argues that "capacity building" often treats communities as deficient while leaving philanthropy itself unchanged. Authored by Civil Strategies’ Midy Aponte-Vargas, the article says that the real challenge is not a lack of grassroots capacity but flaws in how funders and communities work together.

Writing for Stanford Social Innovation Review, Paul Ronalds argues that philanthropy alone cannot solve today's global challenges. Instead, the author calls for stronger collaboration between philanthropic and commercial investment.

The Reverse Call for Proposals puts communities in charge of defining development priorities. This Alliance magazine piece examines this grantmaking model and how it challenges traditional notions of power and legitimacy in philanthropy. (Paywalled.)

ESSENTIAL READING:

Ken Opalo calls for pragmatic state building fo today’s context. He reminds us how under-governed the African continent has been and urges policymakers to avoid fixating on old models, but ensure that “form should strictly follow function in order to avoid problems of over-developed yet terribly ineffective state structures.”  

Focused Topic of the Week

Accountability, Not Technology, Should Drive Trust

A new study on generative AI in journalism concludes that we should reframe how newsrooms think about disclosure: it is not the presence of AI that erodes or preserves audience trust, but the visibility of human oversight governing its use. Readers do not punish technology; they punish opacity. This suggests that trust is not the product of a tool, a platform, or an institution in itself, but of the accountability structure wrapped around it. 

That accountability architecture is what the Democracy Narratives Alliance is attempting to rebuild. Its new action agenda, backed by 40-plus organizations, starts from an uncomfortable diagnosis: people are not rejecting democratic values so much as losing faith that democratic institutions actually deliver accountability, which leaves an opening for strongmen who promise control without the messy visibility of oversight. Their eleven priority actions — from narrative research to a youth storytelling program to the Democracy Stories Lab — are an attempt to do at the level of political culture what disclosure does at the level of a single news article: make the mechanisms of accountability legible again.

This is where the UN Special Rapporteur's report on digital surveillance lands with particular force. If transparent oversight builds trust, an "ecosystem of suspicion" in which governments deliberately weaponize uncertainty — systematically destroys the psychological conditions for civic participation. Activists forced into permanent hypervigilance are not simply monitored; they are isolated from the collective action that would let them verify, together, whether the threat is real. The Media Freedom Coalition clearly lays out how a free press measurably reduces conflict and saves lives in humanitarian crises. That freedom is at risk. Journalism, like disclosed AI oversight, functions as a visible check; suppress it, and both economic stability and physical safety degrade with it.

JOBS

CALLS

CALENDAR

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