What Drives Trust in Chairs of Multilateral Negotiations? Rational, Relational, Reputational, and Emergent Trust: A Multidimensional Model

Abstract

AbstractTrust is the condition on which multilateral delegates permit chairs to play a more active and substantive role in mediating a positive outcome, for example, through tabling compromise proposals. What drives this trust? Whereas the development of trust between negotiating states has been subject to considerable analysis, the negotiator–chair dynamic has received remarkably little attention. This article contributes to filling this gap and in so doing brings two new theoretical strands into the literature on trust in international relations and multilateral diplomacy: organizational behavior and the “practice turn.” Data collected from a practitioner survey, twenty-one in-depth interviews, and an extended period of participatory research at multilateral negotiations are used to build upon prior theoretical insights and develop a multidimensional model of trust in chairs that distinguish, first, between trust as a rationalist risk-calculation and trust as an intersubjective relational state and, second, between a static form of trust as a preexisting exogenous resource (reputational trust) and a dynamic form of trust that emerges from the negotiation process through the competent performance of a set of chairing practices (emergent trust). Preliminary results suggest that trust is primarily driven by what chairs do during the negotiation process, as opposed to who they are.