From control- to trust-based governance and management

This chapter aims to explore the current turn to trust-based governance and management. It begins with a review of the schism inherent to the public governance orthodoxy and its attempt to combine centralized control with professional autonomy. It then considers how New Public Management (NPM) added a new layer of control to the rule-based bureaucratic compliance mechanisms by introducing an elaborate system of performance management and managerial control intended to prevent opportunistic behavior on the part of the public employees. Against this control-fixated governance legacy, the idea and potential of trust-based governance and management is revisited and linked to new theoretical developments that reject the principal_agent model, which seems to undergird much of the recent efforts to secure frontline compliance. This account prompts a discussion of the positive potential of trust-based governance and management and the scope conditions for realizing this potential. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how to balance control and trust, perhaps superseding the dichotomy altogether.