The Entangled Twins: Power and Trust in Collaborative Governance

• Author: Bing Ran,Huiting Qi
• Published date: 01 April 2019
• Date: 01 April 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095399718801000
• Subject Matter: Articles

801000AASXXX10.1177/0095399718801000Administration & SocietyRan and Qi
research-article2018
Article
Administration & Society
2019, Vol. 51(4) 607 –636
The Entangled Twins:
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Power and Trust
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DOI: 10.1177/0095399718801000
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in Collaborative
Governance
Bing Ran1 and Huiting Qi1
Abstract
Power and trust are two important issues of interorganizational relations
in collaborative governance. This article develops a critical conceptual
analysis of the dyadic relationship between power and trust in the context
of collaborative governance. Three dynamic relationships and seven
corresponding propositions are proposed regarding the shared sources of
power and trust, the effects of power asymmetry and power sharing on
trust building, and the influence of trust building on the management of
power relationship in collaborative governance. These dyadic relations will
help scholars and practitioners to deal with the dynamics brought forth by
power and trust in collaboration.
Keywords
power, trust, collaborative governance
Introduction
Collaborative governance has been studied extensively by both scholars and
practitioners in recent decades. Similar terms, including partnership, alliance,
network, and joint working, all capture this emerging phenomenon (Ansell &
1Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Bing Ran, School of Public Affairs, Penn State Harrisburg, 777 West Harrisburg Pike,
Middletown, PA 17057, USA.
Email: bingran@psu.edu

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Administration & Society 51(4)
Gash, 2008; K. Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2012; Huxham, Vangen,
Huxham, & Eden, 2000). In this article, we define collaborative governance
as a multi-organizational arrangement where a number of identified partici-
pants work together based on deliberative consensus and collective decision
making to pursue shared purposes (Ansell & Gash, 2008; K. Emerson et al.,
2012; Huxham et al., 2000; Ran & Qi, 2017).
Prior literature analyzed numerous factors impacting collaborative gover-
nance, among which power and trust are two important ones (Ansell & Gash,
2008; Huxham & Vangen, 2000). Most of the literature on power and trust in
collaborative governance focused on their independent roles rather than their
dynamic interplays (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Purdy, 2012; Saz-Carranza,
Salvador Iborra, & Albareda, 2016; Vangen & Huxham, 1998; Vangen &
Huxham, 2003). Studies on power in collaborative governance often consider
power as a challenge to the success of collaboration due to potential negative
effects resulted from unavoidable power asymmetry (Ansell & Gash, 2008;
Provan & Milward, 2001; Purdy, 2012; Ran & Qi, 2016). Power asymmetry
is commonly noted as a problem as power is almost always distributed asym-
metrically across participants, which may lead to the manipulation by stron-
ger actors in collaboration (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Bryson, Crosby, & Stone,
2006; Huxham & Vangen, 2005). Some literature further analyzed different
sources and arenas of power in collaboration (Hardy & Phillips, 1998; Purdy,
2012), providing a framework to make sense of power dynamics in interorga-
nizational domains. Scholars tend to view power sharing as a solution to
power asymmetry but a series of challenges in sharing power is still difficult
to overcome (Ansell & Gash, 2008; Gray, 1989).
Comparatively, trust is often considered in terms of its positive influence on
collaboration (K. Emerson et al., 2012; Huxham et al., 2000; Ring & Van de
Ven, 1992). The benefits of trust include developing positive attitudes and con-
fidence between partners (Huxham et al., 2000; Ring & Van de Ven, 1992),
cultivating mutual understandings (K. Emerson et al., 2012), lowing transaction
cost (Berardo, Heikkila, & Gerlak, 2014; Gulati, 1995), boosting openness of
expression (Van Oortmerssen, van Woerkum, & Aarts, 2014), promoting con-
fliction resolution (Ring & Van de Ven, 1994), and improving performance of
activities (Johnston, McCutcheon, Stuart, & Kerwood, 2004; Oh & Bush, 2016).
Some researchers focused on trust building, providing a series of approaches to
enhancing trust in collaboration, such as communication and adaption (Das &
Teng, 1998), competence to perform in collaboration (Blomqvist & Ståhle,
2000), and collective problem-solving activities (Booher, 2004).
It is important to note that a set of challenges in power and trust building
in collaborative governance are still unsolved effectively by the current lit-
erature, which largely focused on the individual roles of power and trust in

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collaboration, such as how to budget and justify the necessary time and cost
in power and trust building in collaboration (Ansell & Gash, 2008), how to
effectively manage various conflicts and reduce mistrust among stakeholders
resulted from power issues (Gray, 1996; Huxham & Vangen, 2005), and how
to cope with participants’ reluctance, possible stalemate, and inaction in shar-
ing power (Gray, 1985). These unsolved challenges inspire us to study the
relationship between power and trust from a dyadic perspective rather than
focusing on their independent and individual roles in collaborative gover-
nance. In fact, both power and trust are social forces (Ireland & Webb, 2007),
entangled and intertwined with each other to coordinate interactions between
individuals or groups (Luhmann, 1979). The dyadic perspective often studies
the common bases or sources of two concepts and their mutual influence on
each other. Accordingly, we discuss three dyadic relationships between power
and trust in collaborative governance: the shared sources of power and trust,
the influence of power relationship on trust building, and the influence of
trust building on power relationship. We argue that the three dyadic relation-
ships will effectively address the challenges in power and trust building in
collaborative governance. Promoting shared sources of power and trust can
help participants save time and cost of collaboration by managing power rela-
tionship and building trust simultaneously. The influence of power relation-
ship on trust building is important for understanding and managing various
conflicts and reducing distrust among partners caused by power issues. The
influence of trust building on the management of power relationship is sig-
nificant for promoting confliction resolution, improving performance of
activities, and reducing possible stalemate and inaction in pursuing power
sharing. We believe the analysis of these three relationships can advance our
understanding of power and trust both conceptually and practically.
From the conceptual perspective, most prior research on power and trust in
collaborative governance stops at the individual roles, impacts and mecha-
nisms of power or trust in collaboration (e.g., Bryson et al., 2006; Huxham,
2003; Purdy, 2012; Saz-Carranza et al., 2016; Vangen & Huxham, 2003). This
limits our interpretation of power and trust as it fails to uncover some similari-
ties and interactions between these two elusive concepts. Through a dyadic
perspective that bridges these two concepts together, we identify certain impor-
tant similarities and interactions between different dimensions of power and
trust, such as their sources, types, and effects, all of which are helpful to further
our understanding of these two critical concepts in collaborative governance.
From the practical perspective, as collaborative governance is full of para-
doxes (Huxham et al., 2000), carrying the dynamics of dependency, coopera-
tion, competition, and conflict, neither power nor trust alone can make the
collaboration work effectively in practice. Focusing on the independent role

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Administration & Society 51(4)
of power or trust leads to difficulties in dealing with certain challenges in
collaboration, such as time and cost consuming resulted from trust building
(Ansell & Gash, 2008); questions on authority, transparency, and account-
ability caused by power disparities among participants (Purdy, 2012); and
threats to the performance of collaboration due to stalemate and inaction pro-
voked by pursuing inappropriate equality in power relationship (Gray, 1985).
The dyadic analysis of power and trust used in this article provides a different
way of thinking and solving these issues. Taking advantage of some underly-
ing relationships between different dimensions of power and trust provides
important managerial implications in collaborative governance, which can
help participants consider their power and trusting relationships with each
other simultaneously and explore some useful strategies in coordinating their
interactions more effectively.
This article is organized as follows: We will first provide a critical review
on power and trust in collaborative governance, and then propose three rela-
tionships and seven propositions between power and trust in the context of
collaborative governance. We conclude this article with a discussion of con-
ceptual similarities between power and trust, trust-based power and power-
based trust, as well as a set of managerial implications for participants to
manage power and trust in collaboration.
Power and Trust in Collaborative Governance
In this section, we will first review some general conceptualization of power and
trust that is primary in literature to provide a basic introduction of these...