Governing Indigenous territories: trust, moral economy, and the legitimation of Indigenous territorial authority in the Honduran Moskitia

Formalizing Indigenous land rights is critical for environmental justice and sustainable development. Yet legal recognition often creates new territorial governing bodies tasked with managing collective lands, whose legitimacy cannot be assumed. This study examines how trust in Indigenous territorial authorities is built, contested, and withdrawn following the formalization of collective land rights in the Honduran Moskitia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and household interviews in three villages across diverse socio-ecological settings, the study analyzes how residents assess their territorial authorities. The analysis treats trust as multidimensional and relational. The study examines different forms of trust—dispositional, rational, affinitive, and procedural—to identify the rationales that drive assessments of authority in each village. These rationales are interpreted through the lens of a Miskitu moral economy, framing trust assessments in terms of what residents expect of a territorial authority to be considered legitimate. A moral economy lens contributes analytically to a multidimensional trust framework by explaining why certain forms of trust feel more salient when evaluating authority performance and how they interact with one another. The central finding is that the socio-spatial configuration of land conflicts shapes which evaluative dimensions of trust become most salient. A multidimensional and relational trust analysis contributes a more granular understanding of this process: it shows how different forms of trust interact and shift through everyday encounters with authority, identifying the specific points at which legitimacy is strengthened, strained, or quietly lost.