THE RELATIVE RELEVANCE OF TRUST Revisiting the relationship between trust and cooperation for the environment in large-scale collective action dilemmas

Abstract

Many global environmental problems can be understood as collective action dilemmas which ultimately requires cooperation in order for them to be resolved. Due to certain stressors associated with large-scale collective action for the environment it is unlikely that cooperation will occur. However, in large-scale dilemmas, where involved actors typically have no abilities to communicate or to sanction defective behaviour, trust has been found to facilitate cooperation. But most of these findings stem from research carried out in contexts where societal trust is high. Because of substantial variation in trust-levels among countries there is reason to question whether the relationship also hold in contexts where societal trust is low. A theoretical framework recognizing trust both as a societal feature and an individual trait is elaborated in order to test how generalized social trust and political-institutional trust affect first- and second-order cooperation. Using survey data from European Values Study, results from multilevel analyses show that generalized social trust is positively linked to both first- and second-order cooperation, whereas political-institutional trust only is linked to second-order cooperation. However, putting trust-context under scrutiny reveals that generalized social trust and political-institutional trust are only linked to cooperation in high-trust countries. In lowtrust countries, neither generalized social trust nor political-institutional trust helps to explain cooperation for the environment. As such, this thesis sheds some new light upon the role of trust in large-scale collective action dilemmas, and deepens our understanding as to how trust influence individual propensity to cooperate for the environment.