Public Trust and Citizen Participation in the Municipality of Rotterdam: Natural Gas-free in 2050?

The municipality of Rotterdam aims at being natural gas-free in 2050 in, among others, the built environment sector. As there is a general agreement among scholars that sustainability transitions cannot be addressed sufficiently through only top-down decision-making, citizen participation is crucial (Ju, Liu & Feng, 2019). In addition, the closer citizens are to their government, the higher the level of public trust often is (Moon, 2003). This public trust influences the acceptability of changes in energy policies (Steg et al., 2015). The relation between public trust and citizen participation is, however, not clear among scholars. There are two strains of thoughts on this. One is that more trust leads to more participation whereas the other believes less trust leads to more participation. This study, therefore, has identified the following research question: How does trust in the municipality of Rotterdam influence citizen participation in the energy transition? A multiple regression, carried out by SPSS Statistics version 26, was run using 397 filled out surveys by residents of Rotterdam to examine whether citizen participation can be predicted based on public trust (⍺ = .766), and the auxiliary variables education, income per capita, age, gender and dwelling. Citizen participation has been divided into three subsets: (1, ⍺ = .722) the willingness to implement certain measures in their house (2, ⍺ = .863) the willingness to join particular participation mechanisms, and (3, ⍺ = .538) the citizens’ role and influence in decision-making. Weighted descriptive statistics are provided for all three subsets, whereas unweighted inferential statistics are presented for the first two subsets. It was found that more public trust leads to more citizen participation in the municipality of Rotterdam. In addition, higher educated residents and residents with a high income are predicted to participate more. Furthermore, contrary to what existing literature describes, this research concludes that younger (< 35) residents have more public trust than older (56+) residents and that voters for the party in power do not necessarily have to have a higher level of public trust than voters for other parties. Based on these results, it was recommended to improve the public trust among the residents of Rotterdam to stimulate citizen participation. This could be done by focusing on districts or on themes (e.g. political affiliation). Furthermore, the enabling and facilitating role of the municipality could be explored more. Conclusively, in order to be natural gas-free in 2050, a healthy relationship between the municipality and its residents should exist.