ABSTRACT
Most scholarly thinking makes little if any impact in the wider world. Countless theories and notions come to be formulated, systematized, debated, applied, criticized and evaluated, before vanishing into the dusty archives of the history of ideas. Social capital is not like that. Its sudden rise to prominence in the social sciences has touched a wider public. Thanks to the lively populist streak in his language, Putnam has gifted headline writers a series of vivid and easy attention-grabbers, such as television being a ‘culprit’, or the idea of picnics and choirs as a solution. The interdisciplinary character of the concept brought together wide coalitions of scholars with differing academic expertise, and of course they have also focused on issues that also engage policymakers, such as health, crime, regeneration, cohesion, employment and educational attainment. Treating networks and shared norms as a form of capital has given the idea some resonance among economists, opening doors into the usually closed, clubby world of serious policy debate. This chapter explores the continuing debate over social capital as a
policy tool. From the late 1990s, the concept was taken up by a number of influential policymaking bodies, including the World Bank (Narayan and Pritchett 1999: 284-290; Bebbington et al. 2006) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD
2001a; Schuller 2007). For both organizations, the principal rationale for their interest was to supplement their approach to human capital investment. A rather different, if related, emphasis attracted centreand centre-left policymakers from Australia, Britain, Canada and the US, who were interested in developing social capital as a means of promoting social inclusion and community cohesion (Dhesi 2000). In practice, government interest so far has often concentrated more
on measuring and monitoring social capital than doing much about it. This chapter starts by considering why social capital should become a focus of policy, particularly given the high risks of intervention producing the opposite results from those intended. It then explores the question of measurement, and asks why it has become such a concern for the policy community. Next, the chapter examines a number of attempts to operationalize the idea of social capital for policy purposes. Finally, it considers the prospects for policy in what remains a complex, contradictory and uncertain area. In these circumstances, the future of social capital as a tool and goal of policy inevitably remains open.
