I recently had to write a short text about the need for and challenges of trust-based public governance. most of it is also relevant to all types of organizations.
Challenge of Public Governance
As more and more public governance challenges are characterized by simultaneous high complexity and high value conflict, also called wicked problems, trust becomes ever more important as frontline professionals need the discretion to address these wicked problems. Trust is considered to be important for the legitimacy of government, democracy and public authorities.
Extant public governance theories, however, fall short of providing guidance for how trust can form the basis for public governance that also requires controls and accountability. In Traditional Public Administration (TPA) and its bureaucracy trust is understudied. In New Public Management (NPM) the underlying rational choice theories assume people will maximize their self-interest (with guile), which implies that people should be distrusted and NPM has led to institutionalized distrust. In New Public Governance (NPG) relations are recognized as crucial and the central role of trust is acknowledged, but this has not yet led to substantially more trust-based governance.
The role of trust in public governance
Trust acts as a lubricant in society’s social relations. Without trust, societies, organizations and democracy struggle. A society or an organization in which people can trust each other has many advantages over one based on distrust: people are better able to deal with the inevitable uncertainty and complexity; it is better in taking risks; it supports innovation, learning and collaboration; and it is more efficient. Last, but not least, trust has an intrinsic value, it is what makes us human and improves our quality of life.
Trust, however, is not blind or naïve and sometimes distrust is justified and functional. We need to be responsive to the specific context and needs and this makes trust very context-specific. This implies that the professionals charged with implementing the public tasks, creating the public value, need to have sufficient discretion with the appropriate checks and balances.
The dominant dynamics of distrust
Despite the recognition that trust is important in dealing with wicked problems, today’s experience of most people working within public or third sector organizations delivering public tasks – such as education, health care, social security, youth care, police or social housing – is predominantly distrust. This distrust comes from the policy makers towards the organizations delivering public tasks, and is often passed on by the organization’s leaders towards the frontline workers. Some of it comes from the rules demanding accountability regarding how the public funds have been spent, others come from demanding accountability for the quality of the service delivered. It leads to high administrative burdens (red tape) within the public and third sector organizations, where the professionals sometimes spend up to 40% of their time on administration. This is not only (largely) nonproductive time, it also demotivates the professionals. And in today’s labour shortages, addressing these issues is becoming increasingly urgent.
This distrust from policy makers towards those delivering public services also has an impact on the citizens receiving the public service: they also experience predominantly distrust as the policy makers often distrust the citizens who need the public services.
In short, the current dominant dynamic is that most controls are currently experienced as distrust and as a result that trust and control are experienced as substitutes. As long as trust and control are experienced as substitutes, trust-based governance will be difficult.
Trust-based governance
Both empirically and theoretically, trust and control can, under certain conditions, complement rather than substitute each other. Trust is facilitated when the behaviour of others is more predictable, therefore, controls that strengthen predictability help trust-building. Trust becomes meaningful when it leads to trusting actions, so understanding how to facilitate trust-based governance requires the application of behavioural insights.
A central challenge is the deeply held beliefs that people hold around trust and its relationship with different forms of control (including accountability, compliance, auditing, supervision, regulation). This has deep implications for how policies are formulated and implemented and how citizens experience public services. And for the amount of time people within organizations spend on the different reporting and accountability systems and how much they feel intrinsically (autonomously) motivated.
Questions to address are, what are the condition of trust-based governance where trust and control complement each other? How can organizations design and implement their governance mechanisms based more on trust rather than distrust? What are good practices and how can we theoretically explain their success? What are the challenges that organizations aiming to govern based on trust face?