ABSTRACT
In the past decade, a consensus has emerged among scholars and practitioners of development that “social capital”—popularly defined as local forms of association that express trust and norms of reciprocity-can contribute significantly to the alleviation of poverty worldwide.2 Such claims about the promise of social capital rest largely on the discovery by Robert Putnam (1993), the term’s most vociferous proponent, that dense associational networks within civil society correlate positively with indicators of political democracy and economic growth. Conversely, as Putnam (1995) argues with regard to the US polity, political malaise and economic stagnation can be traced to declining stocks of social capital in neighborhoods and communities. If we take the World Bank (2001) as a reliable authority on the matter, the task of development is to identify, use, invest in, and create an enabling environment for this particular form of capital.
