Differentiating trust in rural decision making drawing on an English case study

Abstract

Within the context of rural civic participation, three different types of trust are described, based on Simmelian-related constructs: personal trust, system trust and instrumental trust. Each has two components, a ‘justification’ and a ‘leap of faith’. These vary in proportion according to degrees of knowledge held. Shifts in public domain decision-making have changed the emphasis of different types of trust. In using constructs of social capital to explore rural decision-making, bonding social capital is seen to cohere around notions of personal trust, bridging social capital around system trust and contested social capital around instrumental trust. In rural decision-making it is suggested, drawing from case study evidence in Gloucestershire, England, that personal trust is becoming increasingly important because of the localisation of decision-making and ambiguities in representation. A greater reliance is also being placed on system trust because of increasingly complex decision-making structures. Whilst in principle instrumental trust can be ameliorated through access to knowledge and information, increasingly, the volume of information is problematic, and decision-makers are relinquishing their knowledge to ‘experts’.

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