ABSTRACT
The discussion so far has shown that as approaches to community, and the practice of community development, shift so too will the nature of the involvement of museums. Museums, it is apparent, cannot be separated from the needs and concerns of other sectors. When national or local government sets its agenda, its priorities will shape museum policy and practice. When ‘think tanks’ produce reflection on key aspects of societal reform, whether in relation to education or social policy, they too will shift thinking about museums. An idea that is current amongst such national governments and think tanks is the notion of social capital, which has also found relevance for those exploring and developing the purpose of museums. In the US, for instance, social capital has been established as an important concept explored by the Saguaro Seminar, an initiative developed by Robert Putnam to reflect on trust and community engagement.1 The concern of a meeting of the Seminar in 1999 was the role of the arts in civic engagement, which led to a set of recommendations on how the arts can be a means to develop social capital. In March 2006 the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), ‘the UK’s leading progressive think tank’, published a comment on cultural policy and civic renewal that took social capital as its key tool to explore the relationship between the two areas. Both of these initiatives, one American the other British, are a demonstration of a rising interest in the idea of social capital as relevant to how we plan for and think about culture, museums and heritage.
