Introduction to the special issue “Trust, mistrust, distrust, and trust-building in the nuclear sector: historical and comparative experience from Europe”

Trust is essential for successful participatory policymaking in high-risk industries, such as nuclear energy and radioactive waste management. However, while efforts at building trust are omnipresent in policy practice, the downsides of excessive trust and the potential virtues of mistrust and distrust are poorly recognised by practitioners, and remain under-researched in social science scholarship. This special issue contributes to filling the research gap by presenting a unique collection of articles transnational, comparative and historical analysis of trust, mistrust, and distrust in empirical cases of past and present nuclear energy and radioactive waste management projects across Europe. This introduction presents a shared conceptual framework for the articles of the special issue, built on two distinctions: 1) the three key concepts of trust, mistrust, and distrust, and 2) the three dimensions – social, institutional, and ideological – that cut across those three key concepts. A number of tasks for future research are identified. These include more fine-grained and context-sensitive analysis that would help operationalise concepts such as prudent scepticism and mistrustful civic vigilance in real-world situations; better understanding of when constructive mistrust might turn into dysfunctional distrust; the dynamics of trust, mistrust, and distrust in non-democratic societies; and the interaction between interpersonal, institutional, and ideological dimensions of trust, mistrust, and distrust. Finally, more conceptual and empirical work is needed to integrate and operationalise the principle of mistrustful vigilance in existing social science research on techno-scientific promises and expectations, in an effort at developing new ‘regimes of promise’, better in tune with the current era of apocalyptic threats and ambiguous perceptions concerning the risks and blessings of techno-science.