19. Trust Among International Organizations

Uncertainty impedes cooperation and trust reduces uncertainty. In the wider social sciences, trust is conceptualized as a way to promote cooperation where control is either not feasible to the degree needed or an inefficient instrument to prevent exploitation. More recently, scholars in International Relations (IR) also started to explore the analytical value of trust to better understand interstate relations. Until now, however, systematic research about trust in and among international organizations is extremely sparse. Our chapter presents the main conceptual foundations of trust research and discusses how to apply them to the study of inter-organizational relations in IR. Guiding ideas on this topic can be imported from management and organization science, where a rich literature discusses different antecedents and effects of trust-building between organizations. With the help of this literature, we tackle the main conceptual challenge of IR trust research: to theorize inter-organizational trust as a dynamic process across different levels of analysis. The three sub-questions that make up this challenge and hence guide our chapter are the following: First, how to conceptualize trust in a way that does not occlude its unique features when compared to other mechanisms of uncertainty reduction. The second question we address is how to make sense of trust as an inter-organizational property: How does individual trust relate to and interact with trust at the organizational level? The third question concerns the complex interactions between trust-building processes and different practices of inter-organizational cooperation: How does trust affect cooperation, and how is it in turn affected by cooperative practices? In answering these questions, we provide a conceptual foundation for further research.