Department of Organisation and Personnel Management, Rotterdam School of Managem, Netherlands
Institutions today face a growing crisis of trust, undermining governance, cooperation, and social order globally. Commons governance offers critical insights for the institutional field, where trust is both essential and fragile. While formal legal systems rely on adversarial processes to resolve disputes, commons governance depends on trust-based, community-driven solutions—yet trust is constantly threatened by conflict. This paper seeks to understand how trust can be sustained in fragile systems by examining the mechanisms communities use to navigate conflict and restore broken trust. Drawing on field research in Auroville, a self-governing international community in the south of India, we develop a process-temporal model that captures the episodic and continuous dynamics of trust and conflict in managing commons. By identifying key mechanisms for building, repairing, and restoring trust, we demonstrate how trust operates as a dynamic, evolving process. This study highlights the necessity of sustaining trust in fragile systems through adaptive, community-driven approaches, offering both theoretical insights and practical lessons for long-term collaborative governance.
