Trust, for what purpose?

By Dr. Kieren Moffat 6 min read

Bridge over a valley

In October, I attended the fifth International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) Responsible Mining Leadership Forum in London. I’ve attended every year since the forum began, I think, and it has become one of the events I most look forward to. There are few opportunities quite like it to hear how leaders across the mining industry and beyond are thinking about the challenges facing mining. I invariably leave having learned something and with plenty to think about.

This year’s theme was Value(s), deliberately bringing together two related but distinct ideas: the values that underpin responsible mining and the financial, social and environmental value the industry creates. Over three days, discussions ranged from good governance in divided societies and the challenges of a polarised information environment to investor expectations and the difficult choices facing industry leaders.

Despite the theme, one concept seemed to dominate the conversation: trust.

It even became a bit of a running joke, with our MC keeping an unofficial tally of how often values and trust were mentioned. Trust was winning by a comfortable margin.

It made me reflect on progress within the industry.

How far we’ve come

When I first became involved in conversations with industry about trust and mining more than a decade ago, its relevance was far from universally accepted. I remember discussions in which the idea that companies should concern themselves with community trust was actively contested. There were influential voices questioning whether trust was an appropriate or even useful concept for thinking about the relationship between mining and society.

Today, trust rolls off the tongue of industry leaders with a familiarity that would have been difficult to imagine then. It has become a central organising concept for thinking about relationships with communities, institutions and society more broadly.

That is quite a remarkable shift, and one I welcome.

But as the forum progressed, I found myself returning to a question that I think deserves more attention:

Trust, for what purpose?

Trust was discussed extensively, often as something to be earned, maintained, strengthened or restored. Yet it was sometimes less clear what that trust was ultimately intended to enable. There seemed to be an implicit assumption that building deeper trust was itself the destination, rather than something that helps make other outcomes possible.

This distinction matters.

Trust is not the end point

I’m going to get a little technical here, but this is central to my professional life, my academic research and how we think about improving social performance with customers at Voconiq.

In the research models we’ve developed and tested over the past 15 years, trust is not generally the ultimate outcome we’re trying to explain. It is a mediating variable, sitting between people’s experiences and expectations of mining and their acceptance of its activities.

Put simply, how people experience a company influences how much they trust it, and that trust, in turn, helps explain their willingness to accept its activities.

This is not simply a theoretical proposition.

In research published with a colleague, Airong Zhang, in 2014, we demonstrated that perceptions of procedural fairness, the quality of contact between companies and communities, and experienced impacts were important predictors of trust, which in turn strongly predicted community acceptance of a mining operation.

These findings have been foundational to Voconiq’s approach to measuring and understanding relationships between organisations and the communities they work alongside.

While trust can be an outcome of people’s experiences, its importance doesn’t end there. The broader point is that trust has a function within relationships - it has relational utility.

What does trust actually do?

My preferred working definition of trust draws on Mayer and colleagues’ (1995) influential formulation: to trust another person or organisation is to be willing to make yourself vulnerable, believing they will not take advantage of that vulnerability.

Explicitly, trust is a willingness to accept vulnerability, rather than simply a positive opinion of someone or some organisation.

This understanding has deep foundations in organisational psychology and social science. In an influential 1995 paper, Mayer, Davis and Schoorman distinguished trust from the behaviours it makes possible, particularly people’s willingness to take risks within a relationship.

Subsequent research by Dirks and Ferrin explored how trust influences behaviour and performance, including how it can strengthen or constrain the effects of other factors on relationship outcomes.

One finding I find particularly compelling comes from a large-scale 2013 review by Balliet and Van Lange, which brought together findings from a substantial body of research examining the relationship between trust and cooperation. They found that trust was particularly important in supporting cooperation when the interests of the parties were in conflict. In other words, trust appears to matter most when people have good reasons to disagree, but still need to find ways to work together.

Think about that in the context of mining.

Companies and communities will not always agree (understatement!). They may have fundamentally different interests, expectations and perspectives on what constitutes an acceptable outcome. Trust doesn’t make those differences disappear, nor should it. But it can create the conditions in which people remain willing to engage, negotiate and work through them.

This is what I mean by the relational utility of trust. Its importance lies not simply in how much of it exists, but in what becomes possible between people and organisations because it exists.

We often draw an analogy with personal relationships when discussing our research with Voconiq customers. If a friend doesn’t listen to you, treat you with respect, follow through on commitments or recognise what’s important to you, it becomes difficult to remain invested in that friendship. Over time, even small disagreements can become harder to navigate, misunderstandings more difficult to resolve, distance is created and disappointments that might once have been easily forgiven can put the friendship itself at risk.

Conversely, when trust is strong, a relationship has greater potential to accommodate disagreement, withstand challenges and create opportunities for collaboration.

Of course, relationships between mining companies and communities are considerably more complex, involving power imbalances, competing interests and responsibilities that extend well beyond any individual relationship. It’s also not an option for community members to ‘unfriend’ a mining company operating in their backyard.

Trust doesn’t replace accountability, effective regulation or respect for rights. Nor does being trusted necessarily mean that a company is behaving responsibly.

But trust can provide the relational capacity to work through difficult issues and pursue outcomes that might otherwise remain out of reach.

Returning to values

There is an interesting connection here to the forum’s framing of values and value.

One reading of the proposition in the theme was that values matter if they translate into value. Or that values have greater utility when the overlap with benefit is greater. I understand the sentiment, but I find that framing a little too instrumental.

Sometimes adhering to deeply held values comes at considerable financial or organisational cost. Indeed, the difficulty of remaining true to our values when abandoning them offers a compelling short-term advantage is part of what makes values meaningful in the first place.

Trust presents a related, but different, challenge.

Recognising the utility of trust should not reduce it to another organisational asset to be accumulated for commercial advantage. Communities are not obliged to trust mining companies, and trust cannot substitute for delivering on commitments or respecting the interests and rights of others.

Rather, trustworthy behaviour can create the conditions in which relationships deliver outcomes that matter to both parties.

And that brings me to a question I think deserves greater attention as the industry continues to mature its understanding of social performance.

If (and it’s a considerable ‘if’) mining has become increasingly sophisticated at understanding how to build trust, has it become equally sophisticated at understanding what to do with the potential that trust creates?

A company could enjoy considerable trust among its neighbouring communities and still fail to realise much of the potential of those relationships if it lacks the willingness, organisational capability or institutional structures to collaborate meaningfully.

Building trust and making good use of the opportunities it creates are related, but distinct, challenges. To illustrate the point, one of the hardest variables to move for our customers is the extent to which community members feel they are able to influence decisions made by mining companies that effect them. They’re challenging skills to embrace.

What becomes possible?

The mining industry is being asked to produce the minerals necessary for the energy transition, support economic development for millions of people, respond to geopolitical priorities and respect the distinct rights and interests of Indigenous Peoples, among many other challenges. All while navigating competing expectations about land, water, environmental impacts and the distribution of benefits.

These challenges cannot be resolved simply by achieving higher trust scores. They require relationships capable of supporting difficult decisions, accommodating genuinely different interests and sustaining constructive engagement over time.

Trust is one of the conditions that makes those relationships possible.

I left London encouraged by how deeply trust has become embedded in the industry’s understanding of responsible mining. It is evidence of substantial progress in how mining thinks about its place in the world.

But perhaps the next stage of that progress lies in shifting more of our attention from trust itself to the potential it creates, and how organisational systems and practices can support that potential being realised.

After all, the ultimate objective is not simply to be trusted. It is what becomes possible when trust exists.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on how to capture the benefits of increased trust - get in touch at info@voconiq.com.

References

Disclosure: This post was written by the author and polished using AI for copyediting and clarity.

Dr Kieren Moffat
Dr. Kieren Moffat

Kieren is a social scientist committed to building deeper, more reflective relationships between communities, companies, industries and governments.

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