Marsh McLennan Advantage’s latest report, Built to Last: Infrastructure and Trust in a Changing World, examines the role of trust in the infrastructure ecosystem and elaborates on how private infrastructure owners and operators can build and maintain trust with stakeholders.
The post-pandemic global economic recovery, the intensifying effects of climate change, and the evolving threat of cyber risk are creating new trust-based issues that challenge traditional relationship dynamics. Without appreciating enhanced sensitivities and volatilities that accompany these trends, owners and operators risk being blindsided by fast-moving events, from which they could face a difficult recovery.
Trust plays an important role in the infrastructure ecosystem. As providers of essential services to society and industry, owners and operators of assets must routinely balance expectations of users, investors, governments, and regulators in the face of competing interests and finite resources. Trust is a complex concept, but when the expectations of all stakeholders are consistently met, a firm can be confident it has the social license to operate over the lifetime of the infrastructure asset.