Vulnerability: the active ingredient of trust in public governance

Joseph A. Hamm and Francine Banner

Chapter 2 in Handbook on Trust in Public Governance, 2025, pp 25-39 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Whether by standardising measurement or coordinating global responses to climate change, public governance actors are typically empowered to leverage their various resources to address public vulnerability. Paradoxically, however, these efforts necessarily create new potential for injury. Trust—as a willingness to accept vulnerability—is therefore critically important. This chapter explores this intersection, first, by elucidating imposed, relational, focal, and emergent vulnerability to internal and external harms as discrete types with distinct implications for trust. We then turn to their dynamics and posit that—per the proposed law of conservation of vulnerability—addressing vulnerability typically does not destroy it. Instead, vulnerability evolves as trustors work to convert vulnerabilities they feel into more acceptable versions. We then present three complementary approaches centering vulnerability in public governance and conclude with a normative argument regarding the inevitable tradeoff between the vulnerability experienced by governance actors and that of the public they serve.

Keywords: Imposed vulnerability; Emergent vulnerability; Vulnerability tradeoffs; Conservation of vulnerability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781802201390
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