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Government – particularly government in Western-style democracies – has been the big loser of the public’s trust over the past 20 years. Confidence that the system works, that society is fair, that the future is secure has given way to fear. Uncertainty has eroded the expectation that the coming generation will live more prosperous lives than their parents.

In the West, inequality, time-poverty and the rising cost of living has sapped belief in capitalism and stoked the sense that power and opportunity are drifting to the East. Technology has empowered the individual, displacing the old voices of authority, creating networks that tell you what you want to know, crowding the public square with taunts, exaggerations, and lies, all of which tests faith in the political system. Natural disasters have helped convince people of the climate emergency, cementing frustration at a vacuum of leadership.

True enough, people’s trust in all institutions has actually increased since ������began tracking trust 20 years ago. But the past two decades of trust data sound an alarm and, if they go unheeded, there’s worse to come. So, what can we expect of the 2020s?

In many ways, more of the same. Technological disruption that wrong-foots incumbents. New means of communication that erode the old media. Easternization that offers an alternative to U.S. pre-eminence from technology to finance, infrastructure to culture, environment to security. Automation of processes that spreads across the private sector, transforming industry and services, and into healthcare, education, and welfare. Private, encrypted communications networks that distort the marketplace of media, information, and debate. And migration of large numbers of people that’s spiked by extreme weather conditions and chasms of economic opportunity.

But the challenges to trust are a call to action – and people are stepping up to answer it. Trust in business is up. In recent years, business has responded to the public’s call for greater ethical and effective leadership by showing it. This is a profound shift. It’s happened because business is responding to the public’s call for greater involvement in addressing societal issues. No doubt, too, people trust “people like me” and they find them most often in the workplace. But it’s also clear that business’s sense of mission has changed in the 2010s, as so many of the chief executives of the world’s largest companies have been willing to define a purpose for the business over and above the bottom line.

Purpose, to be sure, has its limits. Business can only address what it controls. The sneaking suspicion of CEOs is that expectations will run beyond what they can deliver. For example, even those whose companies can get to net-zero carbon emissions in a hurry can’t pretend that they can create a carbon price, reprioritize international energy generation and distribution, or accelerate innovation in carbon capture and storage. Those are jobs that only lawmakers and regulators can do. But employees, customers, and society at large expect more of corporate leadership today and, increasingly, they are getting it.

The 2020s promise to be a decade of activism. There’ll be more popular activism – i.e., community groups, public campaigns, and networks of people fighting for their environment and the planet, for their identities, safety on the streets, justice in the system and for opportunity and integrity at work. There’ll be a new wave of financial activism – i.e., company pension funds, college endowments, state-backed savings programs, charitable trusts will be harnessed to put pressure on business, government and the media. And there’ll be much more local activism – i.e., states and cities within countries will take it upon themselves to deliver for their citizens, where the national government is falling short.

This activism need not just be something done to the big four institutions of government, business, media, and NGOs. It can and should be done by them. And while none of the four institutions can afford to wait for the others to act, the more they do so in concert the better.

For government, activism is going to mean addressing the disruptors: technology, globalization, automation and data, information platforms and carbon emissions. It’s self-evident that the governments that can harness the accelerating changes of the 21st century in the interests of their citizens will be rewarded with trust. So far, it has been the governments of Asia, generally technocratic and interventionist that have been willing to do so.

In much the way that business has been recognized for stepping into a new age of executive activism, the credibility of democratic government in the 2020s is going to depend on a renewal of its purpose, an activism rooted in a vision of the world and the capabilities to deliver on it. This is easier to say than to do. But, as we have seen, the price of administrative bureaucracy and elite complacency is a fundamental loss of trust.

As with government, there are no easy fixes for the media. Like government, too, it knows more of the same won’t work. Media activism will need to take two forms.

On the one hand, even the social media platforms are now calling for regulation. This need not mean an Orwellian state policing free expression. But it can and should mean the expectation of public standards of accuracy, accountability, and diversity of views on digital platforms, just in the way that such standards were required of radio and television when they emerged as dominant mass media platforms. Those standards can be set by regulators and designed so that it’s up to the platforms themselves to meet them. They wouldn’t be the first utilities to have to figure out the complicated but important problem of meeting their social responsibilities: water companies are required to meet regulatory standards to ensure they don’t poison the well.

On the other hand, the media will have to fix itself. Like every other business, it’s going to have to innovate its way out of its reliance on old business models punctured by new media. And here’s the good news: it’s happening. Whether it’s the eruption in TV streaming services, the surge in listening to podcasts and digital assistants, the huge investments in international news networks or the wave of new news start-ups, there’s a revival in the information industries under way. The watch-out is that not everyone will have access to the new journalism. We are threatened with a two-tier information world in which only those who can afford it get reliable news.