Natural resource issues are among the most important challenges facing the world today. In the United States, the U. S. Departments of Interior and Agriculture and state natural resources authorities are critical in addressing issues like water shortages and loss of biodiversity. Importantly, these institutions often lack the resources or legal jurisdiction necessary to require the public to act in more natural resource friendly ways, especially when private land is involved. In situations like these, it becomes essential that institutions develop the public trust necessary to encourage cooperation with their efforts.
Researchers have identified six major reasons for this trust in natural resources institutions (e.g., trust in others generally, previous experiences with the institution, etc.); however, these reasons for trust in natural resource institutions have rarely been directly compared to identify which are most important for encouraging cooperation. Additionally, most research fails to test which reasons are most important for which "kinds" of people (e.g., people who know a lot about the issues or are particularly concerned about the environment, etc.). The current research will test the relationships between trust and intention to cooperate or actual cooperation behaviors in two samples of land owners. The first sample will involve a large representative sample of land owners with more than 20 acres of rural land in Nebraska who will be asked about their willingness to cooperate with a Nebraska natural resources effort by granting access to their land for conservation. The second sample will include Nebraska land owners who are being asked specifically to cooperate with a Nebraska prairie restoration effort and who will then be followed to identify whether they actually do cooperate. The results of these surveys will help improve the interaction of institutions and the public in meeting natural resource challenges.
Natural resources governance is a complicated endeavor in today’s world. While much of this complication arises from biological, chemical, and ecological issues, the nature of modern natural resources governance is such that without the cooperation of the broader public (or at least specific stakeholders) effective governance is essentially impossible. The dissertation funded by this National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Award investigates the role of one potentially important driver of the cooperation necessary for effective natural resources governance, namely trust. To that end, this dissertation presents three chapters that advance the scientific understanding of the role of trust in cooperation with natural resources management institutions. Chapter One provides legal contexts for the evaluation by addressing the issue of cooperation with natural resources governance from a legal perspective. The chapter begins with a discussion of the role of natural resources institutions in the United States with a focus on the major challenge to their effective function, namely private property, and argues that the sometimes opposing interests of land owners and these institutions create the potential for conflict. The chapter then reviews the case law in which natural resources actions have been formally challenged on privately owned land and shows that in the three states with the highest percentages of privately owned land, private land owner challenges to agency action are rarely successful. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of a specific basis of trust in these challenges, namely, procedural fairness. Chapter Two takes a step back and addresses the fundamental and persisting question of the nature of trust by proposing a framework of trust that has the potential to incorporate a great deal of the existing relevant scholarship. Specifically, it argues that attitudinal trust, as a willingness to accept vulnerability in dealings with another, is a major driver of intention to act trustingly and trusting behavior. Additionally, the framework argues that attitudinal trust is itself driven by various bases of that trust; constructs that share an ability to reduce either vulnerability itself or increase its subjective acceptability. The chapter then reviews the three major bodies of trust literature in light of the proposed framework and shows that the scholarship on trust from the organizational, risk management, and government literatures are largely consistent with the framework as proposed. Chapter Three provides an empirical test of several hypotheses embedded in the framework proposed in Chapter Two within a model of trust and voluntary cooperation in the context of natural resources governance. The chapter uses two studies with Nebraska land owners to test 1) the separability of the constructs, and 2) the influence of trust on cooperation. The chapter also presents and tests the sophistication moderation hypothesis (Hamm et al., 2013a) that argues the effects of the bases of trust on cooperation will themselves be moderated by the sophistication (i.e., knowledge and experience) of the trustor such that with less sophistication, more general constructs will be most predictive. With additional sophistication, however, more institution-specific constructs are expected to increase in predictive ability. The results provide some, albeit complicated, support for the hypotheses. In particular they suggest that 1) the constructs are separable but especially highly correlated, 2) trust does have a small, but significant, independent influence on cooperation intention and cooperation behavior, and 3) it is trust in the institution requesting cooperation and not trust in other related institutions or others generally that is most predictive. Finally, the chapter fails to provide strong support for the sophistication hypothesis. Thus, the dissertation finds that although natural resources institutions in the United States are particularly well positioned to address natural resources issues, their ability to effectively manage natural resources may be facilitated beyond the brute force of the law by ensuring high levels of trust in them. Further, the dissertation finds that within the conceptual morass of cross-domain trust scholarship, there is evidence of a framework that is able to provide some degree of clarity for the construct. Finally, the dissertation finds some support for a proposed model but identifies potential issues within it such as the similarity of responses to the various bases of trust and possible limits of the sophistication moderation hypothesis.
