Three concepts associated with ‘good governance’, referring to the quality of governance processes and outcomes, are examined in this chapter: accountability, legitimacy and trust. For each concept, definitions are reviewed and characteristics identified. The chapter investigates accountability through key themes of complexity and challenges associated with delivering on downward accountability in the context of decentralisation. Complexity arises from the number and range of actors involved in co-management, situated at different administrative levels, with multiple demands on and mechanisms for accountability. Different forms of legitimacy and trust are introduced and reviewed, including input, output and throughput legitimacy and dispositional, rational, affinitive and procedural forms of trust. Challenges to delivering and maintaining legitimacy and trust in the context of co-management and solutions to these are identified.

Relational equality theorists have drawn attention to the expressive dimensions of social and institutional hierarchies, highlighting the ways that expressive disrespect, for example by state institutions and officials can entrench social inequalities. Meanwhile, theorists of trust have drawn attention to the ways that agents who are disadvantaged or marginalised are often treated with presumptive distrust by social institutions and excluded from the trust economy. This paper draws on these insights, on empirical findings from the literature in social psychology on procedural justice, and on conceptions of vulnerability, to argue that expressive disrespect and presumptive distrust by state institutions is a form of injustice that can entrench vulnerability. The theoretical argument is supported and extended by discussion of a notorious example from the recent Australian context, Robodebt, a government scheme that was found to be illegal, which used automated decision-making technology to identify and claw back alleged overpayments to social welfare recipients.

Clinical ethics consultation was requested by the intensive care unit regarding a young woman with a near full-term pregnancy on the brink of COVID respiratory failure. She refused lifesaving mechanical ventilation, as she embraced the religious instruction of her upbringing to distrust religious outsiders and instead allow God to personally direct her choices. A psychiatrist determined that her beliefs were atypical, but she had medical decision-making capacity to refuse ventilation. Without it, her intensivist team anticipated her death along with the fetus within hours. Ethical consultation weighed the following: rights to bodily autonomy; standards of informed refusal; religious coping; nonabandonment and trust; moral distress and sympathetic regret. With her permission, the ethics consultant contacted her family, who were dismayed by her choices and reached out to persuade her otherwise. Within hours, she provided consent for ventilation and cesarean section; despite these, she required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for ten days. Ultimately, she and her healthy newborn were discharged home. In follow up, she described no regrets over her care nor distrust of her providers. The clinical ethicist is haunted by the uncertainties of the practice of medicine and ethics, as well as by missteps in the consultation process

Chapter 6 focuses specifically on the last two decades of the Ancien Régime. The traditional local credit market featured norms of solidarity, fairness, and cooperation and allowed its agents considerable input regarding the terms of their agreement either before contracting and/or afterwards. But structural changes in the 1770s, such as an increase in credit activities, drawing on the power and profitability of such exchanges, and especially the appearance of new investors, affected the social and legal norms and nature of these markets. The gradual and massive resort to external parties to handle and manage financial transactions remodelled these institutions into specialized and incontrovertible experts. Embedded in society, the local court system traditionally responded to the demands of its users and their input shaped the form of the institution. When a new category of investors emerged, their requests, in turn, tended to shape the judicial institution, serving their interests first and above those of other users, allowing the evolution of the judicial institution into a more specialized one. These institutions became more efficient in debt conflict resolution.

The anxieties of the 1950s intensified as the Cold War heated up. JFK ’s election promised a New Frontier, and then his assassination extinguished that flame. On the one hand, the civil rights, Chicano (El Movimiento), women’s, student democracy, labor union, environmental, and public interest movements of the 1960s promoted a robust government response in which Congress passed hundreds of new laws to address the concerns raised by the movements. LBJ’s Great Society also included an array of social program that addressed the extraordinary level of poverty in the country. On the other hand, the Vietnam War significantly dampened the hopes for a Great Society as tensions arose between those for and against our continued presence in Vietnam, weakened trust in government. The political movements added to this lack of trust when they supported legal procedures to make sure that government did its job. As faith in government receded, and the reaction to the extraordinary expansion of government intensified, the table was set for a new allegiance to a market economy.

Chapter 6 points out that people’s searching for information plays an important role in understanding different forms of distrust. People especially tend to be oriented toward what authorities think of them, in part because authorities have power over people and can exclude them from important groups or grant them permission to become full-fledged members of those groups. Furthermore, how institutions evaluate someone conveys important symbolic information whether they are viewed as a valuable member of society. In turn, when someone assesses or suspects that their views are not taken seriously into consideration, this increases the chances of distrust in the social institutions at hand, and the people representing those institutions. Processing information about what happens in society in an abstract way tends to facilitate the formation of distrusting attitudes. A central theme of this book is that fairness and justice are taking place where the individual meets the group. That is, whether your group (including your community and society) treats you in a fair way reflects how the group and important members of the group think of you. Experiencing concrete instances of unfair treatment has special significance and increases the chances of judgments of distrust to develop and flourish.

Racially fearful White Americans regularly call 911 at the first sign of a “suspicious” Black person in their predominantly White space, be it a neighborhood, country club, or exclusive academic institution. These calls are met in force by armed government agents all too ready to enforce the color line.

Determining whom to trust and whom not to trust has been critical since the early days of ancient civilizations. However, with the increasing use of digital technologies, trust situations have changed. We communicate less face-to-face. Rather, we communicate with other people over the Internet (e.g., Facebook) or we interact with technological artifacts (e.g., chatbots on the Internet or autonomous vehicles). This trend towards digitalization has major implications. It affects both the role of trust and how we should conceptualize trust and trustworthiness. In this chapter, insights on phenomena related to trust in a digital world are reviewed. This review integrates findings from various levels of analysis, including behavioral and neurophysiological. The structure of this chapter is based on four different scenarios of trust in a digital world that were developed by the author. Scenario A describes a technology-free situation of human-human interaction. Scenario B outlines a situation of computer-mediated human-human interaction. Scenario C denotes a situation of direct human-technology interaction. Scenario D refers to a situation of computer-mediated human-technology interaction. The common denominator of all situations is that a human acts in the role of trustor, while the role of trustee can be either another human or a technological artifact.

Many different scientific disciplines have come to some type of agreement as to how trust and distrust are similar to one another and how they are different. Elucidating the mechanisms involved in trust and distrust holds the important potential of improving the way people communicate with one another and are able to work effectively within groups. In this chapter, scientific literature on what constitutes trust and distrust will be summarized and reviewed. This research shows that while trust and distrust are opposite to one another in some respects, trust and distrust also each include a set of unique social, cognitive, and emotional attributes. Furthermore, this chapter seeks to develop a cohesive model of the neurobiological basis for trust vs. distrust. Lastly, this chapter will explore several open questions and directions for future research will be discussed.

This chapter offers a broad reflection on the difficulties and challenges that the notion of trust presents for judges. After a historical excursion, it demonstrates how basing the operation of an area of law on trust is likely to clash with a rich and powerful bundle of ideas and historical experience at national level. This epilogue invites us to consider a shift in paradigm from law based on trust to trust based on law: ‘Seen this way, trust is not a pre-requisite for the law, but rather something that the law and social interaction generate. Trust becomes the end destination, not the starting point.’