Trust for change

This dissertation studies the role of trust in the transformation of European agriculture towards increased diversification and sustainability. The central interest is how trust is constructed in situations where radical and structural changes are required that highly impact stakeholders, whilst also requiring the involvement of those same stakeholders to succeed. This was studied through fieldwork with three co-innovation projects in Belgium, Germany and Sweden that each brought together groups of stakeholders involved in the food system, to work on diversification of agriculture. Based on insights from this fieldwork, it is suggested that trust dynamics are highly intertwined with learning in such co-innovation processes and that it is necessary to understand the ‘underlying’ factors that trust is based on: namely in which ways actors experience uncertainty and vulnerability in relation to the subject of change. Finally it became apparent that developments on a system or society level strongly influenced inter-personal trust dynamics and vice versa.