Building trust

Trust is a relationship

The aim of the study is to formulate action perspectives that water utilities can use to ‘build trust’ in different parts of the organisation. An important principle here is that trust is always established in a relationship in which actors depend on each other and have to accept a certain amount of risk. For example, the public depend on drinking water utilities for clean water and they must accept the risk that supplies of tap water may sometimes be interrupted or contaminated. In turn, drinking water utilities must ‘trust’ people to pay for that water, and they run the risk that not everyone will do that on time. A lot is already known in the literature about the basis for trust that plays a role in this relationship. This study brings together those insights about trust and examines how they filter through to the trust relationships between drinking water utilities and the public. The focus is on how institutional trust is established and what both the public and professionals find important here in relation to the drinking water sector. However, the insights from the desk study will also be relevant for the relationships of trust that water utilities have with other stakeholders.

Basis for trust in the drinking water sector

The first step in this study will be a literature scan to identify the main elements of the basis for trust. The primary focus is on the basis for institutional trust. This is not a matter of trust between individuals, but between individuals and institutions. The importance of a particular basis for trust may vary according to the sector and so the second step in the study will be to examine existing Waterwijs reports to determine which elements of the basis for trust are explicitly present in the drinking water sector. Finally, focus groups will be organised with citizens and professionals in the sector to reflect about those elements of the basis for trust using case histories. Here, we will also address the following question: How do people describe a ‘trustworthy customer’ or a ‘trustworthy sector’?

Deliverables

Trust plays a role in a range of drinking water challenges and therefore also in many KWR projects. Examples are studies of risk perception and addressing disinformation. Precisely because the insights from this study will be relevant for many areas, it has been decided to write a concise and low-threshold text to share the insights from the study. In addition, a webinar will be organised to explain the insights from the study.

Since there is a clear theoretical knowledge gap in terms of how trust operates in the drinking water sector, the aim is also to write an academic paper.