The strategy of economizing on trust does not of course imply that we should wait for cooperation to evolve by itself; it just claims that we should set our sights on cooperation rather than trust. We should, in other words, promote the right conditions for cooperation, relying above all on constraint and interest, without assuming that the prior level of trust will eventually be high enough to bring about cooperation on its own account. … However, attractive as this strategy may be, it begs the crucial question of what is to be done either when p is so low that conditions suitable for cooperation are not available in the first place, or when p is not high enough to sustain potentially beneficial cooperation where those conditions are too complex, costly, or unpleasant to be a conceivable alternative to trust.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 2822