Building Trust With Trust? A Qualitative,Explorative Study of Implementing a Trust Reform in a Norwegian Municipality

Introduction

As governments worldwide struggle with excessive regulations and reporting requirements as well as siloed organizational structures that can hinder collaboration across disciplines and sectors (Fukuyama, 2012; OECD, 2020), the field of public administration has taken a relational turn (Bartels & Turnbull, 2020; Boztepe et al., 2024). Meanwhile, gaining “a deeper understanding of the interface between uncertainty and trust is needed” (Schilke et al., 2026, p. 359) and building and maintaining internal and external trust is of global relevance (Fukuyama, 1995; Rothstein, 2005).

Public reform attempts have been directed toward establishing trust-based internal mechanisms through increasing local autonomy (and trusting in local actors’ ability to make sound judgments). In this study, we explore some of the organizational dynamics within a trust-based and process-oriented governance reform aimed at increasing both organizational and professional autonomy (Johnsen & Svare, 2024a).

Organizational trust can reduce complexity (Luhmann, 2005), enhance decision-making, collaborative processes, and efficiency and innovation in the public sector (Elster, 2007; Möllering, 2006; Nyhan, 2000; Rousseau et al., 1998). Internal organizational trust can also have a positive impact on external trust building with other organizations and citizens (Hasche et al., 2021). Besides organizational trust (Bentzen, 2018), studies have shown that increasing autonomy depends on factors such as local organizational capacity (Fukuyama, 2012) and specific reform capabilities (Moen & Kjekshus, 2026).

In Scandinavian countries, so-called trust reforms have been launched as a counter response to New Public Management (NPM), which in some countries has resulted in extensive control arrangements that can affect the internal motivation of employees and the production of services (Bentzen, 2021, 2022; Berg, 2005; Grand, 2010; Schilke & Cook, 2013). The Scandinavian focus on trust-based reform design and the introduction of trust-based governance and management (TBM) has resulted in various experiments intended to improve public governance and maintain internal and external trust (Bentzen & Winsvold, 2025; Peters, 2021). This study contributes to these efforts by exploring how reform design and local organizational processes can influence organizational trust.

Specifically, we examine the design and implementation of a municipal governance reform seeking to combine reform and organizational trust within home-based services in Oslo municipality, exploring how it was translated into practice (Czarniawska-Joerges & Sevón, 2013; Sahlin & Wedlin, 2017) in three geographical districts. We examine how reform design can impact the conditions for reform work and highlight the local tensions between autonomy and specifications that local managers need to navigate when central authorities launch a vague reform.

This study is relevant beyond the Scandinavian context as it increases knowledge on relational and post-NPM reform attempts related to the New Public Governance (NPG)-paradigm (Osborne, 2006; Torfing & Triantafillou, 2013). In a sense, the Scandinavian reforms represent a live laboratory for such reform efforts, on which extensive research has been conducted. To our knowledge, no studies have explored how municipal managers have experienced the increased organizational autonomy that comes with the design and implementation of Norwegian trust reforms, in relation to the concept of organizational trust within organizations.

Although managers cannot instill trust by decree, research of another public reform suggests that they can cultivate a climate in which trust takes root by balancing openness with authority (Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021). This study elucidates how central authorities and local managers can contribute to cultivating (Möllering, 2006) organizational trust through open-ended reform. Specifically, it examines the following question: How do municipal managers navigate the tensions between specification and autonomy when implementing an ambiguous trust reform with an open design?

Study Context: Home-Based Services in Oslo City

Norway is traditionally known for being a “high trust” country (Fukuyama, 2012) and like other Nordic countries, it traditionally scores relatively high on trust in the national government and public institutions (OECD, 2022). The Scandinavian working-life model cultivates high levels of trust by balancing codetermination and governance (Kjekshus, 2020). Co-workership (Andersson et al., 2021), transparency and openness, and strong, highly autonomous local governments are also typical of the Scandinavian countries (Bouckaert et al., 2017).

Like local governments elsewhere in Scandinavia, the Oslo municipality has relatively high autonomy (Bouckaert et al., 2017). Oslo is both the Norwegian capital and the largest municipality in the country. It is divided into 15 administrative districts, each with a locally elected district council responsible for a wide range of services, including schools, elderly care, and primary health services. Oslo municipality is the only Norwegian municipality organized by parliamentary system like the Norwegian government. We therefore use the concept “local autonomy” and “central authorities,” even if these consepts often are associated with central–local government relations.

There are, however, some nuances to the initial description of trust. A recent OECD (2022) study reported that Norway had the largest decrease in citizens’ trust in their national government of all OECD countries (OECD, 2022), and a Norwegian study found that trust within organizations varies among sectors, with organizational trust being especially low in the health and care sector (Drange et al., 2020). In home-based services, in which our study is situated, this lack of trust has been evinced in extensive monitoring and documentation of the work of front-line professionals (Vabø, 2024; Vallentin & Thygesen, 2017), stimulating a quest for more meaningful control-arrangements (Skov & Rosenberg-Hansen, 2024).

Norway has been known for being a pragmatic and “reluctant reformer.” Yet, reform optimism has increased over the last couple of decades (Christensen, 2005; Greve et al., 2020), and several local trust reforms have been attempted, in addition to a national trust reform launched by the government in 2021. Governing politicians launched the municipal trust reform in Oslo in 2015.

Two years later, in 2017, the Oslo city council introduced government and management by trust as a bearing concept (Citycouncil, 2015, 2017). Within home-based services, the city council presented a “trust-based model” as a new way of organizing services for elderly people living in their own homes. The model, which an alternative to the purchaser–provider model (PPM), relies on decisions made by self-governed interdisciplinary teams rather than in small separate units.

Employee empowerment and user involvement were important aspects of the “trust-based model,” with the provided services based on what service users considered important (Eide et al., 2018). Other central reform elements in the sector include introducing TBM and governance through distributing autonomy and decision-making to frontline professionals, ensuring that the services have sufficient resources, and encouraging caregivers to practice openness and dialog and to take measures to raise competence and anchoring (Citycouncil, 2015).

Norwegian reform processes are often characterized by bottom-up processes (Greve et al., 2020). The “trust-based model,” which was developed with the involvement of both employees and service users, can be described as an organizational, user-driven innovation in the municipal sector that is intended to identify new and better ways of organizing working tasks (Eide et al., 2019).

In developing this reform, Oslo politicians were inspired by Denmark, particularly Copenhagen, which has worked to de-bureaucratize and eliminate unnecessary controls (Bentzen, 2021; Vallentin & Thygesen, 2017). In addition to Copenhagen, the governing politicians and central authorities traveled to the Netherlands to learn from the Buurtzorg-model. The central authorities established a structure for the reform work with a central pilot program and follow-up evaluation (Eide et al., 2018) of the pilot. The competence unit in the municipality also offered some teaching in TBM. Other economic resources that granted by central authorities to support the trust reform in home-based services included increases in resources and competence for all types of professions in the 15 city districts (during the period 2015–2019) and in increase in managers (Schanche et al., 2022).

When the Oslo city council in Oslo guidelines for the reform in 2017, it introduced TBM and governance as bearing concepts, and framed trust as both a strategy and a new way of working. The stated objectives were to increase collaboration (between the citizens and the municipality, and within the municipality), bring attention to results, and the capacity to create better services for the citizens (Citycouncil, 2017).

Other objectives included decreasing so-called “stopwatch care,” which refers to the time pressure involved in professional care work (Byrådserklæring, 2019–2023), by replacing it with a new and more trust-based way of working that involves interprofessional collaboration (Eide et al., 2018, 2022). This in contrasts with the previous PPM-model, in which contracts managed providers’ operations and third-party payers were kept organizationally separate from service providers (Tynkkynen et al., 2013).

Theoretical Perspective on Cultivating Trust During Reform Work

Since there are dilemmas and paradoxes related to how to implement (top-down) organizational and management ideas and still ensure local autonomy, our findings are framed by the idea that, during reform work, central authorities or top managers can cultivate and foster organizational trust by striking a deliberate balance between autonomy, encouraging employee involvement and participation as well as issuing minimal specifications (Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021). By applying a multidimensional and dynamic view of organizational trust and public reform, we consider organizational trust and governance reform an open-ended and active phenomenon that develops continuously through processes and over time (Möllering, 2006; Schilke & Cook, 2013).

An Integrated Approach to Governance Reform

Since the Scandinavian governance and reform model is layered and hybrid, incorporating elements from neo-classical Weberian bureaucracy, NPM, and NPG (Bouckaert et al., 2017; Christensen et al., 2015; Vallentin, 2025), a trust reform can produce competing institutional logics (Håkansson, 2022) which requires an integrated approach to governance reform (Bentzen & Winsvold, 2025).

Rather than necessarily eliminating organizational tensions or paradoxes, the trust reforms often resurface old contradictions such as professional autonomy versus accountability, standardization versus professional judgment, professional discretion versus service equity, specialization versus coordination, central steering versus local flexibility, efficiency versus relational work, and trust versus control (T. Ø. Bentzen & Winsvold, 2025; Breimo et al., 2025; Edelenbos & Eshuis, 2012; Fimreite & Hagen, 2009).

These contradictions can result in critical organizational tensions that managers need to handle during the reform work. Managers balance tight ropes (Mintzberg, 2013) and their capability to handle tensions produced by an open, trust-based reform design (such as those between trust and control, autonomy and accountability, voluntary and forced reform, and top-down and bottom-up processes) can also affect the development of organizational trust and reform outcomes.

As with other organizational tensions or dilemmas, navigation of change is a frequently used concept (Striegler et al., 2025), and the search for a suitable balance point can be an ongoing process, depending on situational contingencies (Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021). Still, in relation to the paradoxes that we discuss between autonomy and specification and trust and control, it will in practice not be easy to strike the “perfect” balance. Li (2021) presents nine different thinking patterns in relation to paradox. Li interprets March’s “logic of appropriateness” (March et al., 2008)—that we are influenced by norms and values and not necessarily the choice that provides the largest utility — in relation to organizational tension or paradox suggests that there is not necessarily an optimal balancing point. Inspired by March Li also introduced the category “neither/nor,” emphasizing how, in practice, it can lead to the introduction of new terms, such as the March and Olsen phrase “organized anarchy” in relation to decision making.

Following the notions of balancing or navigating organizational change, we further develop the Klemsdal/Kjekshus framework. When analyzing the municipal trust reform, we use the concepts autonomy and design specification to explore the organizational tensions and paradox related to a governance reform attempting to “build trust with trust.” Figure 1 outlined a conceptual framework for analyzing the trust reform.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Conceptual framework for analyzing a trust reform.

Design specification is the degree of specification of the reform (Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021), while autonomy, viewed as an invitation to trust (Johnsen & Svare, 2024a), relates to the increase that municipal managers receive in organizational autonomy to design and implement the trust reform.

Method

Data were collected in one narrative document study and in four semi-structured individual and group interviews (Tjora, 2017) conducted from January 2022 to September 2022 with a total of seven informants. Three interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim by the first author, and a professional transcriber completed one. The interviews were conducted in Norwegian and translated into English.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first two interviews were conducted via the Teams digital platform. The interviews lasted approximately 90 minutes, and the data were collected using an interview guide with open-ended questions (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011), leaving room for the managers to elaborate on topics of their interest. The individual interviews contributed to increased richness and depth in the data, and the discussions in the group interviews provided fruitful reflections on the design and implementation of the trust reform. Transcripts of the interviews have 39,560 words.

The study included managers that had experience with designing and implementing a trust reform at either the operational or strategic level. The participants worked in one of three specified city districts in Oslo. The districts varied in sociodemographic characteristics, geographic location within the municipality, and to some extent in how they organized healthcare services.

We sent requests to participate in the study to eight city districts. Participants in the group interviews knew one another beforehand and worked together as a management team. We were not acquainted with the participants before the interviews. For information on the participants’ backgrounds, see Table 1 in the Appendix. To provide a deeper understanding of the background for and development of the reform, the data were supplemented with a study of relevant documents (see Table 2 in the Appendix).

Analysis and Presentation of the Findings

Discussion

Granting autonomy and increasing self-determination can be seen as expressions of trust (Johnsen & Svare, 2024a). However, as the experiences of managers in this study indicate, trust reform seems to presuppose some level of organizational trust and relies heavily on the establishment of relational and institutional trust amongst internal actors. The central authorities showed high relational trust in the local managers by deciding to introduce a reform with extensive room for local discretion and organizational autonomy, combined with few specifications. The findings also suggest, though, that increasing organizational autonomy can be viewed as a way for central authorities to protect themselves by not taking responsibility, if they do not make themselves vulnerable (Vallentin, 2025). From this vantage point, the reform creates substantial local uncertainty and vulnerability among local managers (Schilke et al., 2026).

Our findings therefore suggest that “building trust with trust” through governance reform implies that the local managers need to feel that they have “backing” from the central authorities, in the form of clarity in reform design combined with organizational support and guidance. This finding supports the need for a more relational and process-oriented approach to governance (Bartels & Turnbull, 2020; Boztepe et al., 2024) when central authorities launch a governance reform where trust is both a “strategy and way of working.” The central authorities mentioned several trust relations as key for the reform (City council, 2017). Still, besides focusing on the interactions through trust relations, local institutional trust in the design of the governance reform is also pivotal.

In pratice, the municipal trust reforms seem to represent a layered model for governance reform, since it attempts to combine different paradigms for governance (Christensen et al., 2015, 2024), such as performance-based measurement with a trust-based and distributed type of governance and leadership. Our study also supports that an open, trust-based reform design can produce organizational tensions, paradox and dilemmas that local managers must navigate within a context of competing institutional logics (Bentzen et al., 2025; Breimo et al., 2025; Håkansson, 2022). Faced with these tensions resulting from a lack of specifications, the managers chose to translate and adapt the reform to their local needs, which was also an important design criterion created by the central authorities.

Interestingly, as mentioned, the managers from the city district that participated in the central pilot program did not express the same degree of uncertainty as those who had not participated. The participants in the central pilot with responsibility to develop new and trust-based ways of working within home-based services received support in the form of workshops facilitated by the researchers who followed the pilot. The participants shared experiences of topics such as what it takes to succeed with a trust model and the concept of trust (Eide et al., 2018). This indicated minimal specification could be supplemented or replaced by tailored support from central authorities during the design and implementation phases.

Our findings support other studies showing that how reforms are designed and implemented can impact the reform outcome and organizational trust (Klemsdal & Kjekshus, 2021; Nygård & Blindheim, 2021; Stein et al., 2023). Within the context of home-based services, the trust reform design was somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, it was “forced” and top-down rather than “voluntary” and incremental (Stein et al., 2023) since the central politicians launched the reform with a clear request to develop alternatives to the previous PPM-model. On the other hand, the reform also had bottom-up and “voluntary” elements as the central authorities granted relatively high autonomy by giving freedom and organizational autonomy regarding design and implementation with room for local adaptation. Through the lens of the conceptual framework in Figure 1, such a design of the reform plans and management of the implementation process can be characterized as minimal with regards to design specification and high in autonomy (1: “bottom-up”) – as shown in Figure 2.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Conceptual framework for reform design.

The third and fourth design strategies shown in Figure 2 are not preferable, since both risk in their own ways risk jeopardizing organizational trust. The first strategy—bottom-up with minimal specifications—can create high organizational tensions and a vague and unpredictable reform as uncertainty in reform direction and content can create difficult conditions for high organizational autonomy (as well as participation and involvement) within local organizations. It can also create a risk that the reform is not developed as intended by the central authorities. If managers are insecure about the reform, this can create high organizational uncertainty, risking a loss of organizational trust. The second strategy—top-down combined with bottom-up—can result in a highly specified reform with low ambiguity and high local autonomy, with a substantial need to develop mutual understandings and organizational trust to enable change. Support with processes of broad involvement and participation can dampen local reform resistance.

The third strategy—neither top-down or bottom-up—can lead to an unspecified reform with high ambiguity and low local autonomy that typically ends up as a so-called paper reform. Finally, the fourth strategy—top-down—generally leads to a specified reform with low ambiguity and low autonomy. Such an approach carries a high risk of local resistance, loss in organizational trust, reform reject, change fatigue, and change cynicism (Amundsen & Kongsvik, 2008; Stensaker & Sverdrup, 2023).

The two combinations (1 and 2) that involve broad involvement and participation require local reform capability, minimal specifications, and/or tailored support from central authorities. These conditions indicate that a “semi-open” design is to be preferred. Still, the reform design should be flexible, and sensitive to the local readiness and capacity for organizational autonomy and organizational trust. In the context of home-based services, city districts that struggle with low levels of organizational trust and/or have had negative experiences with planned change projects are likely to exhibit a higher need for broad involvement and participation to build organizational trust and confidence in the project.

The reform design was open, relational, and defined by relatively high participation and involvement. The findings further suggest that the change design for developing the new, trust-based way of working was characterized by relatively inclusive and co-creational processes and built on pilot reforms and broad participation. Such processes suit the traditional Scandinavian and Norwegian models of cooperation between employees, managers, and union representatives (Gustavsen, 2011). Still as emphasized, “building trust with trust” requires some level of organizational autonomy combined with minimal specifications. Even if the municipal trust reform studied here was launched by the central authorities, and its design can be categorized as so-called bottom-up, the initial reform resistance or uncertainty that some managers experienced seem to be related to ambiguity in the design of the reform.

These findings support the notion that organizational tensions or paradoxes need to be continuously navigated and balanced. For the trust reform studied here, the “both –and” approach, such as attempts to integrate trust and control, when they are viewed as complementary rather than opposites, and the “neither–nor” approach (Li, 2021) are especially relevant. In relation to our study, to build and maintain organizational trust, neither pure trust-based (with total autonomy and no specifications) nor pure control-based (with low autonomy and high specification) governance regime seems fruitful. We find that the managers struggled somewhat with finding a suitable balance point between these two types of governance.

To further develop a collective competence on trust-based reform-design, we suggest that the following concepts should be explored further: “semi-open design,” “trust-supportive governance,” and “reflexive and active trust or autonomy.” The concepts of reflexive trust and autonomy emphasize the need to continuously reflect over and give meaning to these normative concepts in the local organizational contexts, in a critical, dynamic, tailored and active sense (Möllering, 2006). In future reform initiatives, independent of issue, the trust-based design with the right level of support and guidance along the way, might give way for new more efficient change-processes and translation of overarching political ideas. These concepts can represent new terms to be used in relation to trust-based approaches to governance reform.

We show that not only public managers can have a central role in facilitating the functional roles of trust (Oomsels et al., 2019) but also local politicians and central authorities. The managers’ support for the reform at the time of the interviews seem to represent a signal of confidence in the vertical trust relationship between local managers and central authorities. At the same time, several managers expressed lower initial confidence, which could have been increased with support, guidance, and higher specification in the form of more precise and earlier instructions.

The managers chose to work with the reform gradually by testing and learning from their own and others’ experiences, and they later expanded the reform to new areas and developed it further. Learning from experience and being open to adjusting and modifying a reform are important elements of reform work (Christensen et al., 2015), and the managers expressed that the work was continuous and did not have an endpoint. Aligning with research showing the significant time and resources required for reform work (Bentzen, 2018; Christensen et al., 2015), the managers experienced the reform processes as time-consuming and, to some extent, demanding.

While this study took place in one specific municipal context, which must be considered when attempting to generalize the findings, its contributions are relevant to other contexts and studies that explore post-NPM governance reform. In particular, this study underscores how managers can facilitate organizational trust during design and implementation through early and minimal specifications and support to maintain organizational trust and highlights the importance of not only relational trust but also the impact of institutional trust in reform design.

When launching an open-ended trust reform, it is vital that the central authorities establish a mutual understanding of trust (Vallentin, 2025). The responsibility also lies with the initiating authorities to make sure that the intentions for launching the reform are understood by all parties, including a plan on how it is to be developed in practice. The managers also express a need for clarity in how central authorities understand and interpret central reform ideas, such as TBM. For a trust reform to contribute to the development of organizational trust, the central authority must also accept increased vulnerability (Vallentin, 2025). If not, the trust reforms risk producing vulnerability on behalf of the reform’s receivers, who, in this study, are local managers and professionals.

Future research could examine how the local context influences the need for more hands-on and trust-supporting governance (Bentzen, 2018; Jacobsson et al., 2015), through specification, guidance and support, as well as to what extent the context influences or is influenced by organizational trust and the handling of various paradoxes or dilemmas. Such a study could be carried out by following a reform initiative from its inception and surveying the perspectives of central authorities, local politicians, managers, professionals and service users.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored how municipal managers experienced the navigation of tensions between autonomy and specification related to designing and implementing a local governance reform launched from “the top” with an open, trust-based and bottom-up design. This study of trust-based reform designs within three city districts, and how it was understood by the managers attempting to translate its implications, shows how a lack of specification from central management can influence the local reform processes, as well as on the outcome of it. The reform design can also influence the development of organizational trust amongst managers and professionals. By combining perspectives on organizational trust with reform design, we develop an understanding on how organizational actors on multiple levels in the municipal structure try to find a balance between autonomy and specification. The findings also support the understanding that organizational autonomy can represent both a threat and an enabler of trust. Based on the empirical findings, we show that a trust reform paradoxically should be built with trust, through central authorities’ delegation of power combined with offering of support and guidance as well as predictability by increased clarity in the reform design.

Supplemental Material