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Social Capital Approach to Development

In the late 1980s and 1990s the so-called "social capital" approach started to enjoy increasing influence (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Burt 1992; Coleman 1990; Putnam 2000). Both, sociologists working on micro level problems such as ethnic entrepreneurship and immigrant communities (Light and Karageorgis 1994; Portes 1995; Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993; Waldinger, Aldrich and Ward 1990), and academics engaged in macro level issues such as state-society relations (Bates 1981; Evans 1997; Wade 1990) embraced the concept of social capital - generally defined as the social networks and certain features such as trust or norms of reciprocity engrained in them. This approach claims that the distinct network configurations of individual or institutional actors play a crucial role in explaining development outcomes. For instance, it is argued that the developmental capacity of states depends on their "embedded autonomy"(Evans 1995). In order to be successful promoters of development, state bureaucracies require integration by dense internal ties diffusing norms and an "esprit du corps." At the same time, social ties between the state and civil society provide for accountability and information flows. In a similar vein, scholars maintain that economic success or political participation among immigrants flourishes in the presence of strong intra-community ties in combination with linkages towards the receiving society. These examples also illustrate that social capital might have a "downside"(Portes and Landolt 1996) to it, for instance when immigrant communities exclusively display internal bonding ties, a vehicle for nepotism and exploitation rather than successful development. These insights taken together have important implications for development policies. Social capital approaches suggest the design of mechanisms for the nourishment of local community networks as well as social ties among local communities and between civil society and the state.

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