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 Regional Development Corporation's(RDC) 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. Researchers 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. Researchers 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.

Key findings:

• Many seemingly common-sense models for the building and maintenance of community trust are ineffective for producing long-term results. They also tend to conflate trust with other related but distinct concepts such as social license, social acceptability, and confidence. Research shows that the increasing distance between producers and consumers can erode trust, but more information, education, and transparency are not the solution: instead, far more complex and nuanced approaches are needed for success.

• Existing research on community attitudes is inconsistent and sometimes contradictory in part due to an overreliance on quantitative surveys and consumer sentiment analyses in academic and industry research; these tend to employ broad questions or overly simplistic measures that do not permit comprehensive analysis or understanding of the deeper issues affecting community trust.

• Current controversial issues—such as animal welfare, new technologies and environmental sustainability—offer critical lessons that can be applied on a cross-sectoral basis. These issues point to the complex spaces of debate that are emerging in contemporary Australia, and to the need for more robust and careful empirical research into the drivers and threats associated with community trust. It is vital to avoid easy assumptions (about the so-called urban-rural divide or the prevalence of knowledge deficits, for example) that will lead to oversimplified solutions unlikely to be successful on a medium- and longer-term basis.

• A lack of evidence base for best practices for disseminating research findings to end-users and engaging with them is a problem that is not unique to the food and fibre production sectors. However, the principles of both public engagement with research and more traditional extension approaches can be used as the basis of novel and effective dissemination and engagement strategies. Ongoing evaluation of these efforts will be crucial both to redress the limited evidence base and build capacity, and to ensure improvement and refinement of these strategies over time and guarantee that the sector benefits from investments in building and maintaining community trust.