The development of trust is a major challenge for the governance of public private infrastructure megaprojects. Contractual pre-arrangements should provide a blueprint for collaborative behavior and trust development but the characters of megaprojects challenge such arrangements. This longitudinal study explores practices of trust development in the collaboration of commissioner and contractor consortia in the Dutch road infrastructure megaproject ‘Schiphol, Amsterdam and Almere’ (SAA). The findings show that six different types of workshops have been used to intervene in the collaboration of project partners in order to develop trust. The study contributes to the debate on governance in megaprojects showing how governance arrangement are enacted in the daily practice in megaprojects. To buffer the potential loss of trust through conflicts, project partners negotiated for a balanced reciprocal relationship, which is the simultaneous exchange of equivalent resources without delay.

This paper studies the ways in which members of inter-organizational teams collectively make sense of unexpected events and how they decide upon engaging in action. Frequently, ambiguity dominates such change processes aimed to create common understanding. Using the notion of the duality of intrinsic and constructed ambiguity, a detailed analysis of the collective sensemaking efforts of an inter-organizational team of railway coordinators in the Operational Control Center Rail was conducted. Building on team meetings observations during the days preceding a large and potentially disruptive winter storm in December 2013, the case study describes the process of collectively making sense of the disruptiveness of the storm. The findings show that contextual and temporal factors determine whether collective sensemaking unfolds as either a shared or a negotiated process.