Building trust: exploring the role of community exchange and reputation

This paper identifies trust as a current crucial challenge for sustainability. Our increased reliance on exchange, specifically where the exchange involves ambivalent trust is a further aspect of this challenge. Ambivalent trust refers here to conflict between our desire to trust others and a reticence to do so, given evidence of opportunism, particularly with regard to strangers. Negotiated exchange is proposed as necessary to account for ambivalent trust. This paper seeks to investigate the potential of addressing ambivalent trust via negotiated exchange using community exchange. Community exchange is a hybrid currency system between monetary exchange and gift exchange. This paper uses the case study of a recently commenced project in North-West Tasmania, Australia, called CENTs – Community Exchange North-West Tasmania, to analyse these dynamics. CENTs aims via a series of stages to build trust and then incorporate the concept of a reputation currency. Although in the early stages of development, to date CENTs is showing potential to build trust via the concept of community exchange, albeit on a necessarily incremental basis.