Building and Maintaining Community Trust in Australia's Primary Industries: Background Literature Review

Abstract

Australia’s primary industries share common risks relating to declining community trust. Decreasing trust can lead to increased regulation, limited market access, disincentives to invest in infrastructure, and reduced industry productivity, profitability, and sustainability. Australia’s RDCs have identified community trust as an essential area for collective investment and research capacity building. This background literature review outlines the evidence that formed the basis of the Research Program Investment Plan. We undertook an extensive review of Australian and relevant international scholarly and industry literature on the food and fibre industries to assess existing knowledge about building and maintaining community trust. We identified significant research gaps that must be addressed before effective intervention strategies can be developed. The review found existing research on community trust in Australia’s primary industries to be surprisingly limited and remarkably siloed. Existing research focuses disproportionately on agriculture, rather than on the broader food and fibre industries, and it tends to examine industries or issues individually, rather considering cross-sectoral challenges or themes. Scholarly and industry research also tends to rely on quantitative methods such as surveys, rather than on qualitative approaches that enable deeper investigation of key issues. As a result, while there have been some efforts to understand issues of importance to the Australian community (i.e., what the community cares about), there has been surprisingly little investigation of why or how these issues become important. Focus on the why and the how is essential for developing cross-sector and whole-of-system strategies that can address specific issues where trust is currently fragile and enable proactive approaches for maintaining trust as new issues emerge.