| Summary: | High levels of trust in government are important in addressing complex issues, including
the realization of the mainstream sustainability agenda. However, trust in government has been
declining for decades across the western world, undermining legitimacy and hampering policy
implementation and planning for long-term sustainability. We hypothesize that an important factor
in this decline is citizen disappointment with the current types of public participation in governance
and that this could be reversed through a change from informing/consulting to a relationship of
partnership. Using case studies from Western Australia, the paper investigates whether an
intervention targeted at establishing a partnership relationship through mini-public, deliberative,
participatory budgeting would improve trust and help the implementation of sustainability. These
results show evidence of improvements in trust and provide conceptual and practical tools for
government administrations wishing to close the detrimental trust gap that may hamper the
implementation of a sustainability agenda.
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