Trust is a key concept in understanding social life and individual agency. The concept has been used increasingly in recent years to explore, inter alia social coherence, corporate citizenship, social capital and economic growth as well as the challenges faced by people living in late or post modern global societies (Rendtorff 2008). Trust is crucial to social life and agency, and consequently understanding trust dynamics is essential for conceptualizing both the governance of children and youth, and their agency, i.e. their participation, citizenship, inclusion and resilience.

Luhmann is often regarded as “the grand old man” of trust theory, and was a key source of inspiration for later trust theorizing by, for instance, Giddens, Fukuyama and Putnam (though it should be noted that classical social theorists such as Durkheim and Simmel also theorized the significance of trust for social life and social coherence). Following Luhmann, trust is not a universally significant condition for social life and social coherence, but is conditioned by the growing freedom of individuals. In this view, trust functions as a complexity reducing mechanism, which is far more important in our highly complex society than in the past. According to Luhmann (2005), trust is a precondition for coping with risk, unpredictability, contingency and complexity, and is hence a key precondition for agency, i.e. participation and active citizenship. Distrust, conversely, is a psychological burden and is disempowering. The concept of trust is thus central to a core field of interest within the ‘new studies of childhood’ paradigm, namely children’s agency, and the institutional framing, facilitation and violation of that agency. In this perspective, trust is a precondition for strategies of inclusion, e.g. inclusive education and the integration of immigrant children; and for strategies of social capital development and the strengthening of children’s resilience (Rayner 2005).

Despite the increasing interest in trust in the social sciences, and the recognition that trust is significant for social life and individual agency, studies on the institutional dynamics of trust in the governance of children and youth remain sporadic and uncoordinated within the field of child and youth studies. The pioneer work, “Violations of Trust. How Social and Welfare Institutions Fail Children and Young People” (Bessant et.al. eds. 2005) is one notable exception. However, this book refers solely to the Australian context, and focuses on the dynamics of trust violationbuilding The theoretical insights that are emerging from European countries about trust building processes provide an ideal platform for creating collaborative research projects at European level with a view to conceptualizing and analyzing the dynamics of trust violation and trust building in the governance of children and youth.

In research on children and young people, trust has traditionally been studied from the perspective of developmental psychology, particularly the significance of secure child-parent attachments and the development of basic trust as a condition for developing children’s  self confidence, self reliance and capacity to trust their own ability to cope with success or disappointment (Bowlby 1988, King & Newham 2008). Similarly, in resilience research trust is often depicted as an indicator of resilience in itself (e.g. Werner & Smith 1992, Bachett-Milburn et.al. 2008). Though this approach offers important insights, a more comprehensive understanding needs to combine this developmental psychology approach with more sociological approaches.

Cockburn (2004) and Neale (2008) take a first step in this direction by suggesting that social trust is an important dimension of, and condition for, children’s active citizenship. Warming (2009) goes a step further by connecting the dynamics of trust, power relations and recognition (drawing on Luhmann, Bourdieu and Honneth) in her theorizing of children’s participation and active citizenship. Empirical findings also point to children’s general lack of trust in adults beyond their families (Neale 2008), which seems to be particularly extreme in the case of children in residential care and foster care (Warming 2008). These findings indicate that the governance of children and youth tends to violate trust. In line with this, Kelly (2005) conceptualizes the increasing surveillance in schools, which affects all children, as well as the policing of ‘dangerous youth”, as forms of institutionalized mistrust of children and youth which violate trust. These violations take place in the name of ‘welfare’, are based on the notion that they are in the child’s ‘best interest´, and they are designed both to protect society from misbehaving, dangerous children/youth, and to protect the latter from themselves (Bay 2005: 149-150, Warming 2008). By extension, Bessant and Hill (2005) point to the ways in which power, knowledge and discipline operate together to reinforce differences between ‘us’ (mature, knowing, middle class white/Western adults) and the ‘other’ (immature, not-knowing, lower class ethnic ‘other’ child), in undermining trust, care and full citizenship.

These initial findings and understandings of the institutional dynamics of trust indicate that an interdisciplinary approach combining citizenship studies, governance studies, childhood studies, social work studies, educational studies, and developmental psychology, among others, will offer valuable contributions to knowledge.