This section presents a summary of the Rapid Review which is provided in full in Appendix 1
There is no unified literature that focuses directly on the issue of trust in government services in regional Australia. There are significant literatures that focus on different aspects of trust/distrust in government and the management and delivery of public services in general. On the latter issue we can find a small number of specific studies that reflect on the difficulties of delivering specific types of services to regional, rural and remote communities. These studies tend to focus on various barriers and potential enablers to primary and specialist service delivery in areas such as family, health and disability services.
There is a literature on community capability, resilience and cohesion in regional Australia which addresses issues of institutional capacity that is relevant but not a core concern of our study. The contention here is that regional communities with a critical mass of public and social institutions and associated networks are more likely to engender public trust in government services; there is also a much larger literature that focuses on service delivery in remote indigenous communities which is outside the scope of this study.
On the issue of how public organisations can address delivery problems there are three pertinent literatures for this study: that on integrated service delivery and mastering complexity through coherence; citizen-centred design thinking; and, long-standing literature on implementation gaps or slippage.
These literatures form the focus of our attention in this rapid review.