Abstract
Many natural resources are managed collaboratively by government agencies and affected stakeholders. Collaborative management is intended to reduce conflict, facilitate learning, and increase consensus among stakeholders. Previous work highlights the role of trust in developing a shared understanding and theory of change for participants in collaborations, but defines trust broadly. The presented work builds on a framework outlining four dimensions of trust important for collaborative natural resource management and argues there is a need to consider not only multiple forms of trust but multiple trust referents. In particular, it is proposed that the effect of individual trust on collaborative outcomes depends on the overall trust environment; when group trust is low individual trust has a limited effect on collaborative outcomes compared to when group trust is high. Measures to examine the multiple dimensions of trust and the trust environment are proposed. Practical implications for considering trust across dimensions and multiple trust referents are discussed.
Highlights
Collaborative governance challenges historical paradigm of top-down control and focuses on bringing affected stakeholders together to inform consensus-based policy and management (Ansell and Gash, 2008)
Are trusting relationships additive or more than the sum of their parts? Can asymmetry undermine the benefits of trust in collaborative governance? there is a need to examine to what extent the effects of individual levels of trust on collaborative governance outcomes depend on the “trust environment.”
Trust plays a critical role in collaborations but work in the collaborative governance literature has too often examined trust in broad terms with unclear referents
Summary
Collaborative governance challenges historical paradigm of top-down control and focuses on bringing affected stakeholders together to inform consensus-based policy and management (Ansell and Gash, 2008). Procedural trust was necessary for continued participation and could serve as a springboard for the development of rational and affinitive trust Taken together, these studies highlight key components of the integrative framework of collaborative governance relevant to CFLRP projects (Emerson et al, 2012). The potential measures explored in the previous section can be used to assess the different levels of trust members of the 23 CLFRP projects have in society in general (dispositional), the rules and procedures of their collaboration (procedural), and other collaborative members (rational and affinitive) These measures can be used to consider the effect of group-level trust on the process of developing a shared vision for CFLRP projects. While previous work on CFLRP projects provide rich examples of how individuals experiencing procedural, rational, and affective trust contribute to project outcomes, extending this work to assess group-level trust could provide key insight on how contextual factors affect the relationship between individual trust and collaborative outcomes
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