Conclusion: Potentials, Challenges and Limitations of the Trust Approach

Abstract

The ambition of this book was to explore how the concept of trust can contribute to the analysis and theoretical conceptualisation of children’s participation, citizenship and life quality. This ambition has been fulfilled through a collection of chapters, which provides a range of diversity both concerning the theoretical conceptualisation of trust, and with regard to national contexts and subsystem types (see Introduction and Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1994), that is analysed. Although this diversity indeed was intended, it also presents something of a challenge when it comes to drawing general conclusions from the book. I shall nevertheless venture to draw a three-pronged overall conclusion from the research presented in the foregoing chapters. First, we may conclude that trust dynamics are spatially¹ contextualised. Second, the chapters clearly show that the concept of trust is potentially extremely valuable in analysing and theorising about children’s participation, citizenship and life quality. However, it also has a number of limitations and requires further theoretical development. Third, both the potential of the trust concept, as well as its limitations and the need for further theoretical development, are a result of the many theoretical definitions of trust that exist and of the spatial contextualisation of trust dynamics.