The role of trust in public services and public sector reform

Abstract

The balance between trust and distrust is shifting – yet again. The move towards public sector reforms inspired by the New Public Management (NPM) from the 1980s on introduced a series of innovations based on mutual distrust between public sector actors. More recently, the concept of trust has gone through a veritable renaissance, and is now regarded as an essential feature of any kind of collaboration. At the same time, public distrust towards government and public administration has remained solidly on the agenda. In this chapter, we discuss the role of trust in the public sector. We first focus on the promise of public sector reforms to restore citizen trust through improving services and through aligning public services with citizen demands. We then further explore the basic premise of this promise, namely that citizens distrust public services and public administration, by providing comparative data on public trust. In the subsequent two sections, we introduce readers to the roles of trust and distrust in the public sector and in the relation between citizens and government, before moving on to contrasting citizen trust in public officials to public officials’ trust in citizens. The penultimate section shows how trust has recently re-emerged as a key concept in public administration practice and scholarship, facilitating interaction and reducing the cost of transactions. We end with a short summary.