Trust, identity and place-based environmental governance

Marc J. Stern and Dara M. Wald

Chapter 17 in Handbook on Trust in Public Governance, 2025, pp 274-291 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: We describe the challenge of establishing, maintaining, and rebuilding trust in the context of place-based environmental governance, with a focus on a key barrier: identity threats. We suggest that trust and identity are interconnected and multi-faceted, and that they emerge and operate through multiple pathways to shape place-based environmental governance, processes, and outcomes. We argue that an individual's identity is fundamental to their interpretation of and response to trust signals. Thus, efforts to build trust and address distrust must account for identity-based evaluations of trust. Because identity threats and distrust can re-emerge at any time, we urge designing decision-making processes to include multiple strategies for trust management. We posit that the keys to creating, rebuilding, or maintaining trust in place-based environmental governance are to create an identity-protective culture and to avoid mismatched trust signals. We conclude with specific recommendations about strategies that can be used to achieve this goal.

Keywords: Identity threat; Trust ecology; Distrust; Environmental management; Moral foundations theory; Source credibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781802201390
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