Building trust in environmental co-management: Social embeddedness in a contested German biodiversity conservation governance process

Abstract

Co-management is widely advocated to effectively design conservation measures and coordinate policy trade-offs among sectors. Trust is key in such arrangements to achieve tangible outcomes, because it can help to turn disruptive conflict into fruitful contestations over suitable policy innovation. How and why trust in environmental co-management arrangements emerges, however, remains an understudied phenomenon. We adopt a relational angle and present theoretical arguments on the impact of social embeddedness on the formation of interpersonal trust relationships. Specific propositions are developed and empirically tested on data collected in the context of a German biodiversity conservation co-management process. The data is analyzed based on Exponential Random Graph Modelling (ERGM). The results provide empirical evidence on the importance of the relationship between social embeddedness and interpersonal trust. Actor characteristics, such as policy preferences and similarity in cognitions, seem to not play an important role for the choice of actors on whom to trust. We discuss the findings’ implications in the context of environmental co-management arrangements and argue that trust represents as a dynamic relational phenomenon, which is (co-)produced in an interactive governance process.