Climate activism operates in conditions of pervasive uncertainty. Even though there exists a scientific consensus that a climate crisis is happening, the question of the right course of action is extremely complex. It is very difficult to predict whether human action will be able to collectively avoid irreversible damage, as well as the level of commitment that will accompany attempts in this direction. This uncertainty has generated very diverse reactions among political actors, political groups, and individuals from civil society. These reactions range from trust to distrust of experts, hopeful to despairing attitudes among activists, confidence to wariness toward institutions at the national and supranational level, violent grievances, peaceful protests, acts of civil disobedience, and so on.
At the academic level, this situation has stimulated a burgeoning literature on activism. Scholars in normative political theory have focused on the justifiability of activist practices, inquiring, for example, whether the use of violence is justified or whether uncivil disobedience is acceptable within democratic frameworks (Celikates Reference Celikates2016; Garcia-Gibson Reference Garcia-Gibson2023; Malm Reference Malm2021; Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2022; Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2015). Yet, surprisingly, little has been written about attitudes, such as hoping or trusting, that activists hold when engaging with activist practices: the few exceptions to this trend include Moellendorf (Reference Moellendorf2022), Huber (Reference Huber2023), and Thaler (Reference Thaler2023). Even these authors’ works, however, belong to a consolidated pattern in the literature that traditionally framed the debate on climate activism in terms of hope versus despair.
To put it bluntly, hope is distinguished from despair based on whether the agent considers the desired outcome to be at least potentially achievable. However, determining whether an outcome is achievable or not encounters complications when the realization of the desired outcome requires collective action. Does the switch from despair to hope in the case of collective action depend on the same kinds of considerations found in the case of individual action? And, if not, what is it that is unique to hope when collective action is required to achieve more climate justice? There is another concern. In the current literature, the belief in the possibility of the outcome being realized contributes to the definition of what hope is, thereby informing a descriptive definition of hope: in other words, someone either holds or does not hold a belief in the possibility to realize the desired outcome; hence they are either hopeful or despairing. But is there conceptual space for a normative notion of hope? Or should we rather think of it as a sentiment that stands outside the scope of normative theory, while understanding normative theory as only able to intervene in assessing the (personal, political, or both) implications of retaining such a sentiment?
We believe that hope is itself a normative concept, the justifiability of which depends on whether it is grounded on justified trust (in agents, institutions, or ideals, we argue) when it comes to climate activism. Note that our discussion of hope hones in on the assessment of the possibility of the desired outcome to draw on forms of justified trust, thereby engaging mainly with the literature about the rationality of hope. Accordingly, this article explores the relationship between these two concepts: hope and trust. As a preliminary distinction, we consider hope to be a sentiment that need not necessarily be related to the action of other agents: in principle, I can be hopeful independently of how others behave. Trust, by contrast, is an attitude that puts the trustful agent in a condition of dependency on the trusted one: I trust someone to bring about an outcome I cannot achieve alone or to behave in a way that decisively contributes to achieving my desired goal. In this sense, trust is, by definition, always relational.
In this article, we argue that when it comes to climate activism,Footnote 1 justified hope also turns into a relational concept, and its justifiability depends on whether the hopeful sentiment is grounded on an attitude of justified trust in others. Given this relational trait, we look at hope and trust from the standpoint not only of activists but also of institutions as the main interlocutor of activists’ protests. From an institutional perspective, we argue that an attitude of mistrust on the part of activists represents the equilibrium between the need for institutions to be trusted and the duty of activists to critique unjust social arrangements and institutions that are unresponsive to justified demands for more just background conditions. Mistrust being a form of trust, it still makes hope justified on the part of activists.
Note that our argument develops on two different levels: conceptual and practical. On the former level, we aim to show the link between justified hope and justified trust. Our use of the term “justified” is consistent with the literature on the rationality of hope; that is, it refers to the conditions of possibility of hoping, although it is not a normatively loaded concept of justifiability that relates to moral standards. In this literature, hope is justified when the desired outcome is deemed to be possible. Thus, the normative question concerns the conditions of possibility of rationally hoping, thereby bringing the argument also to the practical level.
Relatedly, this conceptual task does not aim to disqualify hopeful sentiments that are not grounded in some form of trust when we consider the practical level. On the contrary, it tells hopeless activists that they might have reasons to engage with hopeful sentiments if they experience some forms of trust. Note that, even though the argument develops also on the practical level, this does not imply that we take a stance on how activists should fight for climate justice practically or on how to achieve concrete progress. We are focused on a conceptual and practical connection between two attitudes, hope and trust, independently of the specific political actions that might follow (or should follow) from these attitudes.Footnote 2 In this sense, our view is not depoliticized but pre-political; that is, it regards a practical stance that precedes concrete political behavior. One of several reasons for suspending judgment on what to do concretely is that, in our view, people can share the same kinds of trust and hopeful attitudes while still disagreeing on the types of policies or, more broadly, political and social changes that should be implemented.
Note also that we rely on a cognitivist understanding of emotions, which describes them as having both “an affective or feeling component and a cognition that supposedly interprets or identifies the feelings” (Jaggar Reference Jaggar1989, 156). Moellendorf (Reference Moellendorf2020) shares a similar understanding of hope as at least partially sensitive to reasons. We do not take any stance on the affective component but focus our normative argument on the cognitive one. As a result, we do not argue whether one should feel hopeful but do analyze how the cognitive component is justifiably supported by an attitude of trust.
The argument unfolds as follows. In the next section, we argue that, for hope to be justified, it needs to be supported by some form of trust. Our critical target is represented by those accounts of hope that ground its justifiability in the belief that the desired outcome is at least possible, without clarifying what is required for believing that an outcome is indeed possible. We argue that when this justifiability requirement is located in a context of collective action, the assessment of the probability for the outcome to be realized depends on whether we trust other agents. Having established that hope calls for trust, in the third section, we explore various forms of activist practices to see which stances of trust and distrust they embed and how these stances relate to hopeful sentiments. We analyze activist practices with reference to the categories of rational, procedural, and moral trust/distrust in institutions, because institutions are the prime target of activists’ critical stances.Footnote 3 Our minimal definition of institutions includes national and supranational actors within a democratic context that are either equipped with the political power to impose regulations lessening climate change and favoring climate justice or are able to facilitate the adoption of behaviors similarly aimed at these objectives while not having the power to impose regulations (e.g., schools, media, etc.).
Given that both hope and trust are relational concepts in the domain of climate activism, and institutions are often distrusted by activists who criticize them for being ineffective or unwilling to seriously address climate change issues, in the section “Trustworthiness as a Political Virtue,” we switch perspectives and look at the relation between hope and trust from the standpoint of the democratic institutions confronted by activists.Footnote 4 Here we argue that institutions should care about strengthening their trustworthiness in the eyes of activists, thereby nurturing hopeful sentiments, because when there is no room for trust, hope leaves open a space for the use of violence. Although we do not take a stance on whether violence is justified in the case of climate activism, we proceed from the assumption that the pervasive use of violence is not in the interest of democratic institutions’ stability. In addition, a lack of trust and, consequently, of hope might lead to citizens’ disaffection with democratic institutions. Given our understanding of hope as at least partly reason-based, we argue that trustful activists have reasons to be hopeful. We finally put forward the notion of mistrust as the equilibrium between the need for institutions to be trusted and the activists’ role in criticizing how institutions are entangled in confronting the climate crisis. We understand mistrust with Patti Tamara Lenard (Reference Lenard2008, 313) as “a cautious attitude toward others; a mistrustful person will approach interactions with others with a careful and questioning mindset” and will accordingly “adopt a kind of vigilance.”
Grounding Hope in Trust
The scholarship on climate activism often embeds some notion of hope in its account of political action, even though it remains somewhat undertheorized in many cases. Even when not conceptualized explicitly, the notion of hope seems to have more normative power than is often overtly recognized, in that it solicits or grounds a number of normative claims that are central to the analysis of activism, such as whether violence is justified as a response to a lack of hope, whether citizens have a duty to join protests insofar as they hope for the realization of a different social arrangement, and whether activists have a duty not to give in to resignation even when hope turns into despair. Relatedly, to investigate the relationship between trust and hope, we first need to establish which notion of hope we are using.
One recurrent notion in the literature on climate activism, although often it is not explicitly acknowledged, is what the scholarship on hope has identified as its standard definition: “a person hopes that p if and only if she desires that p and believes that p is possible, but not certain” (Blöser, Huber, and Moellendorf Reference Blöser, Huber and Moellendorf2020; see also Day Reference Day1969). According to this definition, for agents to be hopeful, it is necessary (among other things) that they believe that the desired outcome is achievable. “Hope is not confidence that things will turn out as we want. It is not optimism,” Moellendorf (Reference Moellendorf2022, 31–32) cautions; instead, hoping retains a “realistic” vocation, in that it “seems to differ from daydreaming and wishing.” This is the notion that Moellendorf employs in Mobilizing Hope (Reference Moellendorf2022), one of the few explicit attempts to connect the scholarship on hope to that on climate justice.
Other scholars implicitly refer to different definitions of hope. For example, Andreas Malm (Reference Malm2021, 147) seems to agree with Moellendorf that the possibility, not the probability, of bringing about a certain state of affairs is what counts for hope: “No more is required to maintain a minimum of hope: success is neither certain nor probable, but possible.” However, when endorsing Rebecca Solnit’s point that “hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door somewhere,” Malm (147; emphasis added) leaves room for more affective interpretations of the concept. Relatedly, he argues that “to act politically is to reject probability assessment as a ground for action (since it could inspire no action)” and then rails against “climate fatalism” as being a “performative contradiction” (142).
Here the point is not to advocate for or reject a rationalistic notion of hope vis-à-vis other notions when engaging with the issue of climate activism. Instead, we want to explore what embracing such a notion in the context of climate activism entails.Footnote 5 Our thesis is that hoping in the context of climate activism must be grounded in some form of trust in others, in whom exactly (individuals, groups, or institutions) and on which grounds are discussed in the next section.
We saw that individuals hope when (among other things) they consider the outcome to be at least possible. A variety of desired outcomes are discussed in the literature on climate justice. Among the most prominent outcomes are the achievement of mitigation goals that align with the 1.5°C goal (as set out in the Paris Agreement), a just transition toward renewable energy, adaptation policies that match the differentiated vulnerabilities to catastrophes, and the development of negative emission technologies (NETs) to complement mitigation goals. Regardless of whether we address these issues by operating with small-scale objectives rather than large-scale ones, or we focus on individual behavior rather than on institutional responsiveness, any of these objectives must be addressed as a problem of collective action, because only a joint effort can make the (partial) achievement of these goals possible.Footnote 6
This situation has an impact on what hoping entails when it comes to climate activism: given that the outcomes prescribed by climate justice necessarily involve collective action, and given that hope is justified if it is sustained by a belief in the possibility of realizing the desired outcome, hoping in the case of climate activism necessarily implies an engagement with the behavior of others and, in particular, the question of whether they will act in a way that makes realization of the outcome possible. Hope, then, takes on an interpersonal and relational dimension because its justifiability depends on (among other things) what other people do. To hope that we will achieve the objectives prescribed by climate justice, then, we need to hope that others will act accordingly. This raises again the question of the justifiability of holding such a hope: On which grounds can we hope that others will behave according to the goals set by climate justice, if hoping requires believing that it is possible that others will do so?
The assessment of the possibility of others joining the climate cause, we now argue, falls into the realm of trust: in the case of climate activism, for hope to be justified, one needs to justifiably trust others that they will act toward the same goal. Put differently, hope is justified if it is sustained by justified trust in others, because only justified trust in others gives us grounds to think that the desired outcome—the participation of others in the climate cause—is actually possible. Of course, “others” is a vague term. In the next section, we discuss possible forms of trust that can ground hope. But for now, we focus on the connection between the concepts of hope and trust and note that the former requires the latter to be justified if we embrace a standard definition of hope to inform situations in which collective action is required.
To consolidate our argument, we need to delve further into the notion of trust. Trust denotes a relationship that can involve agents, groups, or institutions; in every case, it involves another actor in addition to the one who trusts. This first characteristic already makes trust apt to sustain the interpersonal type of hope implied in climate activism, because a notion of justified trust can inform the relationship among different agents and discriminate between trustworthy and untrustworthy actors. Some scholars have also argued that trust can initiate new relationships or strengthen existing ones. For example, Lenard (Reference Lenard2012, 105–6) isolates presumptive trust as a form of provisional trust that turns into full, justified trust once it is proved that an agent has good reasons to trust the other agent. Given that in climate activism we can hope for more climate justice if and only if, we can be hopeful about the behavior of others, the notion of trust seems to offer the appropriate normative tools to make an assessment about the possibility that others will comply with the climate cause.
In addition, trust can enlarge the scope of hope. In fact, initial forms of presumptive trust can turn into forms of fully justified trust, thereby broadening the spectrum of those for whom we can be hopeful. This, in turn, more solidly structures hopeful sentiments toward the achievement of climate justice goals, because when we trust that others will cooperate to reach climate justice objectives, we are justified in hoping that these objectives will be achieved. Put differently, believing in the possibility that the outcome will be realized is justified as long as we trust that others will cooperate toward that aim.
Second, trust occurs in conditions of uncertainty. In fact, when we trust someone, we are uncertain about the outcome of giving our trust (Forst Reference Forst2022, 3; Warren Reference Warren and Warren1999, 311). Some scholars highlight that trusting someone entails putting oneself in a condition of vulnerability (Baier Reference Baier1986, 234–40; Lenard Reference Lenard2012, 313). This makes trust an apt grounding for hope, because trust and hope conceptually share the same background condition of uncertainty. The upshot is that when we ground hope on (justified) trust, the latter grounds the former without requiring a complementary decrease in the level of uncertainty. This is particularly important for the case of hope in climate activism because of the pervasiveness of scientific uncertainty about the future of climate change (Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2022, 43ff.).
Third, the notion of trust can have both cognitive and affective components. The scholarship on trust is usually divided between particularized and generalized notions, and although the divide between cognitive/affective does not fully overlap with that between particularized/generalized trust, some parallels can be informative in our case. Particularized notions of trust describe it as a phenomenon that strictly depends on the trusted person and on the purpose of the trust relation. An eminent example is Russell Hardin’s (Reference Hardin1992, 506) notion, “A trusts B to do X.” According to Hardin, trust is justified “if you have adequate reasons to believe it will be in that person’s interest to be trustworthy in the relevant way at the relevant time,” where “adequate reason for such expectation will typically turn on past experience to a large extent and on likely future incentives” (505).
Generalized notions of trust, by contrast, do not depend on the identification of a specific object and purpose of the trust relation. For example, Eric Uslaner (Reference Uslaner and Uslaner2018, 6; Reference Uslaner2002, 21) defines trust as having a “moralistic” character and being rooted in “the belief that ‘most people can be trusted’”; in contrast to Hardin’s definition, its “grammar …is simply A trusts,” because trust “does not depend upon experience and is not about any particular person or any particular thing” (Uslaner Reference Uslaner and Uslaner2018, 6–7).
In this article, we mainly refer to particularized notions of trust, which can ground hope when the agent’s hope depends on the behavior of targeted individuals, groups, or institutions. For example, when hope for achieving climate justice objectives is placed in the gathering together of statespeople to discuss and sign the Paris Agreement, particularized trust is invoked to determine whether, for example, there are rational grounds to expect those agents to act in conformity with what climate challenges demand; if, for example, they have been trustworthy in the past in fulfilling their ethical commitments or whether they have incentives to cooperate to achieve climate justice goals. Note that notions of particularized trust can also be based on grounds other than rational ones, where “rational” here, as in Hardin’s definition, refers to positive past experiences or future incentives. For example, one might trust others on the grounds of their moral qualities (Baier Reference Baier1986; Jones Reference Jones1996), their expertise or competence (Christiano Reference Christiano, Mansbridge and Parkinson2012; Jones Reference Jones2012; Pettit Reference Pettit1995), or their involvement in democratic institutions (Warren Reference Warren and Warren1999). Some of these categories also affect generalized notions of trust. For instance, one can hope for the broadening of mass mobilization on climate issues if one believes that people are generally sensitive to moral considerations and will act accordingly, once appropriately informed of the risks involved in being indifferent to climate change.
To ground our forthcoming discussion of trust in activist practices, we rely on ideal-type notions of trust derived from the different accounts offered in the literature.Footnote 7 By rational trust, we mean trust based on positive past experiences or future incentives of the agent to be trustworthy. By moral trust, we mean trust based on the perception that the trusted agent possesses some relevant moral qualities or adheres to relevant moral principles. By procedural trust, we mean trust based on the conviction that the existence and the effective functioning of certain procedures make the agent trustworthy. These types of trust can be used to map trust to different agents, be they individuals, groups, or institutions. Being ideal types, they can only capture the complexity of reality up to a certain point, and of course, real agents trust others on mixed grounds. However, we think that this limit does not undermine our argument, which is more broadly about whether hope is grounded in trust and not on which type of trust specifically must justify hopeful attitudes. In other words, the distinction between different types of trust only functions as a hook on which to hang stances of trust and distrust embedded in activists’ practices, thereby providing our theory with explanatory power. However, we have no interest in allocating different stances of existing activist practices to different theoretical conceptions of trust. In this sense, for hope to be justified, it suffices that some form of trust holds, no matter exactly which one.
This raises a possible objection, which may run as follows: if both hope and trust in the case of climate activism are relational, if both concepts operate in conditions of uncertainty about whether the outcome will be achieved, and if the justifiability of both is measured against the possibility of the outcome being realized, should not the principle of parsimony invite us to avoid overtheorizing? Our reply would be that hope is a relational concept in the case of climate activism, but the justifiability standards included in the notion of hope itself are independent of the characteristics possessed by the relational counterpart. This occurs because, as we saw, the notion of hope per se is not necessarily relational. It becomes relational when applied to the case of climate activism (and perhaps other political cases). Trust, by contrast, is justified depending on (among other things) the characteristics of the agent we might trust—be they moral, rational, procedural, and so on. The notion of hope alone does not have the normative resources to evaluate the agents involved in the relationship, unless it is supported by a notion of justified trust: because hope, according to the standard definition, requires an assessment of the possibility of the desired outcome, this assessment, in turn, requires a form of justified trust. Only once the notion of hope is supported by the notion of justified trust does the assessment of the possibility of an outcome being realized consider the characteristics of those agents that must be involved for the desired outcome to be achieved.
One might now wonder where the argument is supposed to lead, given that activists seem to typically motivate their practices with reference to their distrust of institutions. This leads us to the next section, where we discuss the different ways in which trust and distrust combine in activist practices and draw some normative conclusions about the “minimal” form of trust required for activists to hope justifiably.
Hopeful Activists in Search of Trust
In this section, we look at both real examples of activism and the scholarship on it to appreciate the differences among activists’ practices. We first focus on the activists’ stances of hope, trust, and distrust of institutions. We aim to show that, for activists to be justifiably hopeful when distrust in institutions is profound and irremediable, their hope can still be grounded in other forms of trust, such as trust in fellow activists. We further argue that moral trust in fellow activists is the ultimate leverage against political fatalism. Note that the argument also works in reverse: when hopeless activists experience some form of trust in others, they might have good reasons to replace despair with hopeful sentiments.
Before delving into this issue, we explain some of our premises. First, in our analysis we treat distrust as the obverse of trust; that is, we think that the same grounds (rational, moral, procedural) function as benchmarks to decide whether trust or distrust is justified or not.Footnote 8 Second, we conceive of trust and distrust as scalar notions, rather than binary categories, so one can be more or less trustful, regardless of the grounds for trust. Third, we use a minimal definition of institutions as actors within a democratic context that have either the power to impose obligations or to facilitate the adoption of behaviors informed by principles of climate justice. Fourth, we think that it is reasonable to start with a generalization of this sort—that all climate activists share a more or less intense lack of trust in institutions. More specifically, they share a form of rational distrust based on their past (and current) experiences with political institutions—be they states, supranational authorities,Footnote 9 or organizations—as being (insufficiently) responsive or even functioning in opposition to the call for counteracting climate change. Scholars and activists show different degrees of distrust. The most radical ones claim that institutions do not have any incentive to increase their responsiveness because they are themselves driven by economic interests that are irremediably in contrast with the principles of climate justice. For example, Malm’s (Reference Malm2021) view, which speaks in favor of using violence against property in extreme cases of institutional unresponsiveness, draws on a profound distrust of institutions, because they are imbued with the capitalist logic of production and profit-seeking and are hence unresponsive to and complicit in the emergence of climate change.Footnote 10 Less radical critics still claim that institutions are not sufficiently willing to pay the political costs of adopting adaptation and mitigation policies (Caney Reference Caney2022).
Procedural Trust in Institutions
Although most activists seem to share a distrust of institutions, we argue that, for activists to be hopeful, some form of trust is necessary. As such, we need to look for a type of trust (if any) that can make hope justifiable and still be compatible with the motivation of activists to engage in protests against institutions.
One candidate is procedural trust in institutions, which, as we show, can coexist with rational distrust of them. Broadly speaking, the idea is that there are mechanisms, procedures, and regulations within democratic institutions that force them to increase their level of responsiveness to citizens’ claims or, at least, to show responsiveness once protests have met a certain threshold. This is the type of trust underlying, for example, Moellendorf’s (Reference Moellendorf2022, 129, 95f.) notion of hope-makers. Moellendorf argues that vested fossil fuel interests and power are best met with mass mobilization and global solidarity, which are understood as hope-makers. They justify hope for achieving such a vision of mass mobilization and global solidarity because it is grounded in an evidence-relative assessment of circumstances. Focusing on mass movements, Moellendorf sees recent developments, such as the emergence of Fridays for Future (FFF), as starting to act on a vision of “a future in which people stand to gain from healthier environment, full access to energy globally, generalized prosperity, employment in a sustainable economy and reduced international tensions about energy resources” (30–31). Thus, Moellendorf sees the success of movements like FFF stemming from their ability to strategically mobilize people with their vision of a fairer planetary future that is directly politically opposed to fossil fuel interests. Crucially, movements such as FFF engage in confrontational activities, such as protests, but not illegal direct actions such as violence against property. For Moellendorf, this is a matter of strategy rather than of justifiability in principle.
In short, mass movements are successful when they mobilize people based on their vision. Violent forms of activism seem to at least undermine this cause, as Moellendorf suggests, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence (129).Footnote 11 Moellendorf’s account of hope relies on a form of procedural trust in democratic institutions as being responsive to the changing climate and the heightened (albeit self-interested) risks. On the one hand, institutions are responsive to the dangers of the climate catastrophe and the moral reasons to mitigate and adapt. On the other hand, mass movements aim to mobilize and leverage enough power to oppose fossil fuel interests, thereby triggering responses by democratic institutions because, given their democratic character, they cannot ignore bottom-up stances brought forward by the citizenry.Footnote 12
Moral Trust in Institutions
Another option that can allow for hopeful attitudes is when activists, even if they lack a rational and procedural trust in institutions, at least have a form of moral trust in them. For example, one might think that the institutional procedures at hand are not efficient in guaranteeing institutional responsiveness but believe in the existence of a democratic value system shared within the community in which institutions and citizens interact, such that institutions will ultimately adhere to those values and embed them in their ordering principles. Or one might trust certain institutions, such as schools, media, or supranational organizations, to foster a culture of climate justice that will ultimately affect the functioning of the institutions directly responsible for regulating issues concerning climate justice.
Moellendorf’s account of hope-makers is once again a case in point, because it implicitly relies on some notion of moral trust in institutions’ capacity to engage with solidarity actions among states to achieve mitigation and adaptation. Although he is aware that there are major obstacles to achieving such progress, which he describes as “problems of political economy,” insufficient and ineffective adaptation programs come with their own profound risks to national security interests, as already acknowledged by the US Department of Defense. Awareness of these risks can ground hope for progress, insofar as it might push states and other institutions to implement solidarity actions in this regard (Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2022, 117f.).Footnote 13
Yet under the umbrellas of procedural and moral trust in institutions fall also those stances of climate activism that draw on a notion of civil disobedience, at least understood in its liberal fashion. Scheuerman’s (Reference Scheuerman2015, 433) notion of fidelity to the law helps us explain this case: “By ‘lovingly’ breaking the law, they similarly embody a commitment to the view that every legal order needs to rest on some underlying (normative) commitments to reciprocity and mutuality.” In this case, activism retains a justified form of hope if it expresses moral trust in institutions for abiding by the rule of law—despite having some reasonable distrust in the capacities of existing institutional arrangements to effectively address climate justice deficits. First, fidelity to the law is necessary for hopeful practices because it anticipates and underscores (moral) trust in the principles grounding the rule of law. Without this kind of trust, activists lose their grip on reaching the normative potential that is expressed in the rule of law. Second, this moral trust expressed in the requirement of “fidelity to the law” is consistent with (some form of) procedural distrust of institutional agents. Activists can subscribe to the rule of law and the norms for which it stands while distrusting its current political configuration.
This form of trust can be tracked in activist practices such as Extinction Rebellion (XR), in which its members took illegal actions while accepting the possibility of arrest. The XR activists also communicated openly with the police (albeit not in all countries) about their actions (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2022, 796). Part of XR’s agenda, famously, was to organize disruptive protests that were civil and public and yet were aimed at pressuring decision makers to act swiftly. They have “temporarily moved away” from disruption as a primary tactic but still state: “What’s needed now most is to disrupt the abuse of power and imbalance, to bring about a transition to a fair society that works together to end the fossil fuel era. Our politicians, addicted to greed and bloated on profits won’t do it without pressure” (Extinction Rebellion UK 2022). Around the same time, The Rebel Agreement stated, “We hold ourselves accountable for our actions and do not hide from the legal consequences” (Extinction Rebellion UK, 2019).
XR’s acceptance of legal charges and sanctions expresses some moral trust in the idea of the rule of law and the normative ideals behind it. However, note that, as Hayes et al. (Reference Hayes, Cammiss, Doherty and Saunders2025) show, this trust is limited to the criminal justice system: XR shows little trust in the operation of other democratic institutions. We do not claim that this form of moral trust in institutions—in this example, the criminal justice system—is exhaustive of all practices of XR. We acknowledge the importance of the notion of “radical hope” that is born out of the XR’s movement’s deep distrust in existing institutions, as highlighted by Stuart (Reference Stuart2020). Instead, we take XR’s trust in the criminal justice system to exemplify a notion of trust that can support hope.
Trust in Ideals
At this point, one may wonder whether activists who do not display any form of trust in institutions, be it rational, procedural, or moral, can retain any justified hope to support their activism. We argue that fully distrusting activists are justified in hoping as long as they at least retain trust in non-institutional actors. Here two options are possible. One is moral trust in democratic ideals such as equality, freedom, and fairness that stand at the core of a democratic view of politics. Examples of this moral trust, in contrast to the XR case, are found in accounts of disobedience that reject the liberal paradigm. Take, for example, Robin Celikates’s account of (un)civil disobedience, which criticizes the idea of civil disobedience as a “public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” (Rawls Reference Rawls1971, 364f.). Crucially, Celikates (Reference Celikates2016, 983) argues, “With it, one appeals to the ‘sense of justice of the majority,’ while remaining ‘within the limits of fidelity to law,’ which is expressed by accepting the possibility of punishment.” He argues that the way states define what counts as violent or uncivil is often essential to activist practices, such as blocking streets or damaging private property, which get subsumed under the category of violence. “As a consequence, its activists are being prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated without any acknowledgment of the political and moral character of their actions” (984). Crucially, he contends that states actively portray some forms of activism as good and others as violent or uncivil, with the latter being more often ascribed to the protests of marginalized groups (984). As a result, from the perspective of marginalized groups suffering from structural injustices, “the blanket requirement that civil disobedience has to stay ‘within the limits of fidelity to law,’ in order to count as civil disobedience at all, ceases to be plausible” (985).
Celikates argues against the liberal definition of civil disobedience because it relies on an overly narrow understanding of activist practices and underestimates their radical-democratic potential. The “liberal paradigm” presupposes that disobedience can only be understood as civil if it relies on one of the two notions of trust we outlined: moral or procedural trust in how institutions will respond to the protest. From a structural injustice perspective, these forms of trust are impaired. This has far-reaching consequences, according to Celikates, because it affects the idea that activists should necessarily accept punishment for their actions. Relatedly, Celikates’s critique of the liberal paradigm incorporates a notion of procedural and moral distrust in some democratic institutions, at least in their current configuration, because they do not seem to embed a fully democratic understanding of those core democratic ideals.
However, Celikates (Reference Celikates and Weibel2015, 68) implicitly relies on a notion of horizontal trust in democratic practices: activists hope for structural change by engaging in a prefigurative politics that “experimentally anticipates the transformation it seeks to initiate in the way the struggle is organized here and now: in a horizontal, participatory, inclusive, and civil way.” Understood in this way, activists do engage in a hopeful manner and justifiably so, as long as civil disobedience of this type refuses to place trust in existing institutions but invests in forms of horizontal trust built from the margins that are grounded on the desirability, shareability, and resilience of democratic ideals and practices.
Again, this form of trust is reflected in the practices of some activist groups whose social positions are marginalized. An open letter by the grassroots collective Wretched of the Earth (2019), which consists of groups predominately led by Indigenous people and people of color, challenges the position of XR: “Many of us live with the risk of arrest and criminalization. We have to carefully weigh the costs that can be inflicted on us and our communities by a state that is driven to target those who are racialized ahead of those who are white. The strategy of XR, with the primary tactic of being arrested, is a valid one—but it needs to be underlined by an ongoing analysis of privilege as well as the reality of police and state violence.” Thus, the requirement of fidelity to law—although it is a pro tanto justified position—underestimates the costs implied both in procedural distrust in institutions and in moral distrust in the normative ideals of the rule of law that is based on a historical trajectory of domination and oppression.Footnote 14 Kyle Powys Whyte (Reference Whyte, Miller and Crane2019, 323) stresses a similar point when describing the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL):
I am concerned with how critics of #NoDAPL often focus on defending … US “rule of law.”… Yet critics rarely engage what La Donne Brave Bull Allard …calls “the larger story.” To me, as an Indigenous supporter of #NoDAPL, part of the larger story concerns how DAPL is an injustice against the tribe. The type of injustice is one that many other Indigenous peoples can identify with—US settler colonialism.
For our analysis of hope and trust in climate activism, we need to highlight two points here. First, this kind of activism shows that specific normative notions, such as fidelity to the law, as a requirement for hopeful activist practices come under pressure when the very notion of fidelity to the law is part of a historical trajectory of domination and oppression. As such, procedural and moral distrust in institutions and the rules and norms they employ can be justified. This is potentially daunting for our account of hope that aims to retain the necessity of trust. Second, according to Celikates’s account, climate activist groups like Wretched of the Earth are not devoid of hope and trust. While criticizing the strategies of XR, they do place horizontal trust in the climate justice movement: “It brings us hope to see so many people willing to take action. But … we feel there are key aspects of their approach that need to evolve. This letter calls on XR to do more in the spirit of their principles which say they ‘are working to build a movement that is participatory, decentralized, and inclusive’” (Wretched of the Earth 2019). Relatedly, although Whyte argues that Indigenous people live in their “ancestors’ dystopia” brought about by environmental degradation and conservation policies of settler colonialism, this does not turn into fatalism: “Yet we do not give up by dwelling in a nostalgic past even though we live in our ancestors’ dystopia…. The vast majority of our history precedes the campaigns that have established states such as the United States and Canada. Our conservation and restoration efforts are motivated by how we put dystopia in perspective as just a brief, yet highly disruptive, historical moment for us - at least so far” (Whyte Reference Whyte, Heise, Christensen and Niemann2016, 208). Rather, Indigenous activists aim to build coalitions and tackle questions of environmental justice and colonialism together because they are structurally intertwined.Footnote 15
In short, from a perspective of structural injustice that might be understood as dystopian, hopeful activists’ practice retains the notion of trust by understanding it horizontally and as being aimed at embracing and creating those democratic practices that current institutional arrangements fail to create. This might include demands for a radical overhaul of current institutions, as well as a need for reconciliation, as Whyte argues. It also connects to our understanding of collective action as struggles against vested interests in maintaining a status quo from which a duty to resist and confront oppressive structures arises.
Trust in Non-institutional Agents
This leads us to the second option for trust in non-institutional agents: a form of moral trust in fellow citizens or, even more restrictively, fellow activists. Moellendorf’s theorization of hope-makers offers an example in this regard, because it relies on a notion of trust in fellow citizens both within and beyond national borders that they will join our cause if we provide them with good reasons and a vision of what we can achieve together. This is evident in his discussion of the strategic (activist) advantages of a green growth program over one that is skeptical about decoupling economic growth from CO2 emissions: the latter simply would not mobilize the masses. According to Moellendorf (Reference Moellendorf2022, 143), “hope for robust climate change mitigation requires intelligent movement politics that can offer a counterweight to the plutocratic tendencies in many existing democracies.”
The hope displayed in mass protests like the ones envisaged by Moellendorf, we argue, must be then grounded at least on a form of trust in fellow citizens. Such trust is motivated by the belief that others possess sufficient moral sensitivity to join the climate cause and possibly participate in the protest, thereby deepening its impact on institutions. For example, Lenard (Reference Lenard2008, 328) writes, “Trust is what ensures that citizens are willing to consider the views of an interest group, and to participate with them in fighting detrimental policies if, after careful consideration, they agree that these policies are indeed detrimental.” Trusting fellow citizens on moral grounds can be based on their openness and willingness to reinforce their “reflective capacity” (Shelley Reference Shelley2021) and their disposition to change their plans so they can pursue a moral cause. Importantly, although this type of trust is based on moral grounds, as in the previous example, the object of trust is fellow citizens, rather than moral ideals. Although there might be cases in which the distinction is blurred, it still stands conceptually insofar as one might believe in the force of democratic ideals while still thinking that actual citizens are not sensitive to the salience of those ideals.
Finally, we argue that, if activists consider trust in fellow citizens to be too idealistic, a form of trust in fellow activists is, at the very minimum, necessary to ground justified hope. For example, although Wretched of the Earth (2019) criticized the strategies of XR, it does place horizontal trust in the climate justice movement to “reflect the complex realities of everyone’s life in their narrative.”
At this point, one could raise a final objection: Why should trust in fellow citizens compensate for distrust in institutions and therefore grant justified hope? One short answer is that, given the collective nature of trust and hope in the case of climate activism, anything that sustains the belief in the possibility (not probability!) of realizing the outcome is sufficient to grant hope. One might think that mass mobilization is not currently sufficient to pressure institutions to act, but trusting that fellow activists will continue pressing on these issues at least keeps open the possibility that institutions might develop more responsive attitudes in the future. Surely, in the absence of a pressing voice like that of activists, the chances that institutions might become more responsive decrease, given that their level of responsiveness is so low even when protesters raise their voice in every corner of the globe.
A second, related answer forms the core of the next section, where we argue for why institutions should care about increasing their trustworthiness. Although the contours and consequences of this response will become clearer at the end of that section, we preview our claim: at least according to compound notions of hope, hope entails a practical aspect; that is, it brings with it motivational force (McKinnon Reference McKinnon, Brock and Brighouse2005; Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2006). This means that hoping also means proactively increasing the chances that the hoped-for outcome will be realized, thanks to the motivational force that accompanies hope. This aspect is central when we widen our gaze beyond activists’ trust/distrust to activists’ interlocutors, to which we now turn.
Trustworthiness as a Political Virtue
We saw earlier that in climate activism, both hope and trust are relational attitudes.Footnote 16 In the previous section we looked at instances of hope and trust from the perspective of activists; we now turn to institutions qua interlocutors of activists’ criticism. Here, we argue that democratic institutions should be attentive to instances of trust and distrust expressed by their citizens for both moral and instrumental reasons. We conclude by arguing that mistrust represents the equilibrium between the need for institutions to provide the basis for institutional trust and the duty of citizens to maintain forms of surveillance on institutions’ performances, especially in cases of gross injustice. The literature on why trust is necessary for democracies is prolific,Footnote 17 yet here we have a much more restricted focus on how trust relates to hope in the context of the relationship between activists and institutions.
We are interested in this specific context because instances of trust or distrust affect hope. And hope, in turn, is a “political virtue” (Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2006), once we consider the moral grounds for democratic legitimacy: “Institutional arrangements that fail to provide justice cannot be reasonably endorsed unless they at least provide the basis for hope that just institutions can be progressively advanced by legitimate means of political activity.… The provision of the institutional bases of hope provides appropriate reasons for persons to endorse a partially unjust social arrangement” (426). In this sense, hope is important for democratic legitimacy, insofar as the latter cannot be grounded on the guarantee that a perfectly just political order can be provided.
We also saw that, in the case of climate activism, hope is justified when supported by some form of trust. Hence, for institutions to secure “the institutional bases of hope,” which in turn secure their legitimacy, they need to secure the institutional bases for trust. This is implied in Moellendorf’s (Reference Moellendorf2006) account, even though he does not refer to the language of trust when discussing what institutions should do to grant such bases for hope. One of his recommendations is that institutions “allow for …the basis for a reasonable belief that discussion and political mobilization around such issues can yield progress” (427). This is what we previously referred to as trust in institutions; that is, the idea that democratic institutions are trustworthy because of their responsiveness to activists’ stances.
“Hopeless activists” indeed doubt that institutions are trustworthy in this sense. Note that we are making a normative point here: it says that institutions should take care of instances of distrust brought forward by activists and therefore promote their trustworthiness if they want to secure the institutional bases for hope intended as a political virtue. In this sense, for democratic institutions to be considered legitimate, and so morally permitted to exercise power despite existing unjust social arrangements, they must invest their political energies and strategies in reinforcing their trustworthiness in the eyes of activists.
Yet there are additional reasons for institutions to respond to distrustful and hopeless attitudes by activists. Hopeless attitudes motivated by a lack of institutions’ responsiveness to justified demands for climate action lower the citizens’ regard for the institutions themselves and their commitment to political participation. This, in turn, affects the quality of democratic institutions: as Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor, Calhoun, Gaonkar and Taylor2022, 22–26) observes, the perceived lack of efficacy of citizens’ efforts to bring about more just social arrangements was one of the “loops” that led to the current crisis of democracy, as well as to populist rethinking of the core democratic principles in a more demagogic way. Similarly, Lenard (Reference Lenard2008, 320) has highlighted how distrust in institutions leads to nonvoluntary compliance and “rampant free-riding.” Investing in the trustworthiness of institutions, thereby providing the institutional bases for hope, might therefore be one way to respond to current democratic crises.
It is outside the scope of this article to investigate which institutional innovations should be pursued to increase trustworthiness. However, it is worth emphasizing that trustworthiness can be interpreted in light of the different kinds of trust: moral, procedural, and rational. Rational trustworthiness of institutions might refer to the predictability of institutional responses to bottom-up demands, as well as to their reliability in guaranteeing certain types of responsiveness. Procedural trustworthiness of institutions can be read as the accountability and transparency of the procedures by which inputs are turned into outcomes. Finally, moral trustworthiness sheds light on the moral quality of the principles that structure and guide institutions and their functioning.
Note that this does not entail embracing an idealized picture of politics. In fact, trustworthiness comes in degrees: in our argument, institutions should increase their trustworthiness to the extent that this does not undermine their other key interests, including the stability of the institutions themselves. Institutions are de facto affected by conflicting interests, some of which make them more like corporations than what an idealized picture of democracy would prescribe.Footnote 18 Nonetheless, a partial increase in trustworthiness remains more desirable than a lack of trustworthiness, given the implications it has for providing the grounds for justified hope.
Additionally, activists and social movements raise new political stances, make marginalized voices heard, and put pressure on the injustices of existing social arrangements (Gaonkar Reference Gaonkar, Calhoun, Gaonkar and Taylor2022, 196). Hopeful attitudes affect the efficacy of agents in realizing their goals. In fact, according to compound notions of hope that insist on its motivational role (McKinnon Reference McKinnon, Brock and Brighouse2005; Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2006), when we hope we do not merely desire a certain state of affairs and consider it possible; we are also willing to change our plans according to our hopes or to act to bring about that state of affairs. It is the practical aspect of hope, then, that enables agents to realize their plans and, more broadly, themselves (Moellendorf Reference Moellendorf2006, 423).
This view implies that when activists perceive that the bases for trust are not provided, they see no grounds for hoping, which can result in democratic inertia and political resignation. Securing the institutional bases for hope by investing in the trustworthiness of institutions—especially in terms of their responsiveness to justified calls for climate action—fosters the possibility for activists to endorse the practical aspect of hope and keep representing a fundamental critical voice within democratic societies. In this sense, preventing activists from becoming resigned to a lack of responsiveness helps provide the grounding for pluralistic and progressive societies that are sensitive to the need for remedying existing unjust social arrangements.
At this point, one could raise an objection. On the one hand, it seems that institutions have an interest, for both moral and instrumental reasons, in fostering activists’ trust. On the other hand, given that no existing state can guarantee perfectly just social arrangements and therefore there is always room for progressive political change, activists seem to have a duty to exercise vigilance and critique toward political institutions to keep representing marginalized voices and pressing on relevant issues of social justice. Specifically, they have a duty to fight policy makers’ tendency to defer the political and economic costs of adaptation and mitigation policies solely to future generations. Although institutions’ trustworthiness might be expressed as their responsiveness to legitimate calls for action, this might not grant sufficient grounds for activists to give institutions their full trust, given the persistence of social injustices. Does this mean that activists and institutions have irreconcilable needs and tasks and that, therefore, the trust needed to sustain hope can never be achieved?
The demands and stances of activists and institutions are sometimes fundamentally opposed, because they perform different roles within democratic societies: the activists’ role is critical and disruptive, whereas that of the institutions is ordering and stabilizing. Nonetheless, we suggest that a situation in which activists mistrust institutions represents the democratic equilibrium between the needs of the two partisan positions. We follow Lenard’s notion of mistrust as a form of vigilance, which she in turn borrows from republicanism in contemporary political theory. Pettit (Reference Pettit1997, 263) defines vigilance as “the virtue of remaining alert, especially in dealing with powerful authorities, to the possibility that others may be behaving in a corrupt, sectional fashion.”
Mistrust represents a condition of democratic equilibrium in several respects. It does not embed as extreme a form of suspicion as distrust, which, as we saw, is detrimental to democratic politics. From the institutional standpoint, it grants more stability, participation, and affection than distrust. Yet, at the same time, mistrust prevents citizens from placing their blind faith in institutions. Recall that, as Moellendorf emphasizes, hope is different from wishful thinking or daydreaming. In this sense, mistrust is a form of self-defense not only against manipulative stances potentially put forward by political authorities of various kinds but also against forms of oppression that are systematically embedded in the status quo via cultural, social, or linguistic habits that are scarcely questioned. From the activists’ standpoint, it can sustain forms of hope, precisely because, as Lenard argues, it both fosters forms of trust among citizens and presupposes some form of trust in institutions themselves. Finally, mistrust represents a noncontradictory equilibrium, in that, as Pettit (Reference Pettit1997, 265) has argued, “the vigilance we display in constraining our legislators is not inconsistent with trusting them.”
Finally, mistrust has the advantage of being a parsimonious attitude because to dispel its function, it need not be exercised by the citizenry as a whole. This is a salient characteristic because not every single citizen will have the same sensitivity; personal disposition; and economic, political, cultural, and communicative means to express criticism of institutions, mobilize against unjust social arrangements, or denounce the oppression of marginalized voices. In this sense, mistrust is a democratic equilibrium in which each and every citizen can (and should) be informed and touched by activists’ battles, while still leaving political action to those more apt to engage in direct political action.
Conclusion
We ended this article with the suggestion that mistrust represents a democratic equilibrium between the need for institutions to be perceived as trustworthy and the activists’ duty to exercise vigilance and critique. Mistrust is qualitatively different from distrust, not only because it is less disruptive but also because it can coexist with forms of trust. Trust, in turn, is important for democracies because it justifies hopeful attitudes, thereby contributing to the progressive and pluralistic character of political societies. We further argued that for hope to be justified in collective action scenarios—that is, to meet the criterion of possibility in the standard definition of hope—activists must ground their hope in some form of trust. This can be as minimal as having moral trust in their fellow activists. It follows that hopeless but trusting activists might have reasons to engage with hopeful sentiments. Other forms of trust can also underpin hopeful attitudes, albeit in a more demanding way: moral trust in fellow citizens more broadly, moral trust in democratic ideals, and moral and procedural trust in institutions. At the very conceptual level of the definitions of trust and hope, we showed that justified hope, when held in cases in which collective action is required, is dependent on justified trust.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the organizers and participants in the “Hope in Times of Crisis” workshop that took place in June 2023 at Goethe University Frankfurt. We would also like to thank Claudia Blöser, Jakob Huber, Darrel Moellendorf, and Cain Shelly for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of this article. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful engagement with this manuscript.
Conflict of Interests
None of the authors have a conflict of interest to disclose.
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