Kota Kinabalu: Trust between communities and confidence in public institutions are the two key ingredients that allow people of different backgrounds to build lasting partnerships, said social cohesion researcher Dr Leong Chan-Hoong.
“Two very important ingredients in that equation will be what we call horizontal and vertical trust,” said Leong, Senior Fellow and Head of the Social Cohesion Research Programme at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
“Horizontal trust refers to the quality of ties between different communities of different ethnicity, religious background or nationality. Vertical trust refers to the quality of relationship between the individual, the community and public authorities,” he said.
He said this at the Opening Forum on East-West Multi-Faith Partnership for Human Dignity, held as part of a roundtable discussion on multi-faith partnership in praxis for human dignity and flourishing at the Pacific Sutera here on Tuesday.
For the record, Leong is regarded as one of the world’s 10 most established scholars in acculturation and intercultural research, according to a 2022 bibliometric analysis published in the “International Journal of Intercultural Relations”.
His research focuses on immigrant integration and inclusion, inter-ethnic relations, national narratives and human-environment interaction.
“Horizontal trust reassures communities that they will not be undermined regardless of their background, while vertical trust allows people to feel their voices are heard and that policies affecting them are fair,” said Leong, who also sits on Singapore’s National Integration Council and a community advisory panel, and has provided consultancy to public institutions and international organisations.
Speaking on lessons from Singapore’s approach to managing diversity, he said the city-state’s model rests on three broad principles.
He cited public housing quotas as an example, under which every apartment block in Singapore must have a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian residents.
“The purpose of that essentially is to ensure that no housing estate will become a complete racial enclave,” he said.
He noted that this comes with a trade-off, as individual choice is sometimes limited. He pointed to mother-tongue education being tied to a person’s official racial category, with a Chinese student assigned Mandarin and a Malay student assigned Bahasa regardless of personal preference.
“Singapore’s approach tends to be reductionistic in nature, with differences framed largely along racial or religious lines rather than at the individual level,” he said, pointing out that the approach works because Asian societies tend to be relational in culture, where family, race and religion carry weight.
The second principle he raised was intentional multiculturalism, where diversity is deliberately built into everyday spaces such as housing, schools, workplaces and even electoral constituencies, rather than left to chance.
The third principle, he said, is a consistent emphasis on shared experiences, and not only those tied to interfaith or festive occasions.
He said common pain points can be just as effective in bringing people together as positive experiences, pointing to Singapore’s National Service, which involves two years of military conscription, as an example.
“This is the single most influential policy that encourages different individuals from different racial backgrounds, from different religious backgrounds and from different citizenship backgrounds to come together,” he said.
“It is a social leveller because no matter your background, you are treated the same way, you sleep in the same dormitory and you go through the same exercises,” he said.
He said Australia’s volunteer firefighting culture offers a similar example outside Singapore, noting that the country relies on roughly 200,000 to 240,000 volunteer firefighters, who make up about 90 per cent of personnel on the ground during bushfire season.
This shared responsibility, he said, helps forge a sense of belonging among Australians.
“Policymakers, practitioners and academics will increasingly need to identify these common touchpoints in daily life and find ways to encourage meaningful interaction between people of different ethnicities, religions and citizenship backgrounds as diversity becomes a growing feature of societies worldwide,” he said.