Social Capital/Social Development/SDV

Transcription

1 Social Capital/Social Development/SDV Anthony Bebbington Department of Geography University of Colorado at Boulder Note prepared for the workshop: Social Capital: The Value of the Concept and Strategic Directions for World Bank Lending IFC, Washington DC March 1, 2002

2 Opening reflection What would have been the relationship between social capital and development studies had not the World Bank engaged so thoroughly with the concept? The question is, of course, impossible to answer. However, it is worth posing because for very many commentators it seems impossible to discuss the validity and usefulness of the concept of social capital without immediately taking into consideration the fact that the Bank has devoted what seem from the outside to be such significant resources to studying, measuring and in general promoting the life of the idea. 1 There are two points that flow from this observation that, I suggest, have implications for our discussion today. First, for many theorists the association between social capital and the World Bank automatically weakens the validity of the concept. The possible effect of this is that, in development theory at least, the half-life of the term will be shorter than it might otherwise have been had it entered discussions of development through some other door. This, I think, means that our discussion of the utility of the concept of social capital for development should focus on the relative usefulness of certain ideas behind the concept, rather than the concept of social capital itself. Second, we (and above all, those in this event who work day to day within the World Bank) should reflect on whether there is anything specific to the context of this institution that makes the concept helpful. That is to say we might conclude that even if in theoretical and practical terms the concept is not very helpful or novel in some contexts, it still is useful within the particular context of the World Bank. Indeed, there is no necessary reason why concepts that are deemed useful within the culture of a particular institution will be deemed helpful by a broader public. 2 In what follows I first briefly acknowledge some critiques raised against social capital and then identify what seems to me useful in this concept. I then suggest specific ways in which it might be relevant to World Bank practices. I close with a reflection on implications for SDV and the agenda of social development at the Bank. Social capital and development Many critical things have been said about the concept of social capital (see in particular Fine, 2001). While some of these seem to be overstated, several of them are important: (i) that the concept is loosely specified; (ii) that social capital has been used in different ways by different authors; (iii) that its quantification has often hidden as much as it reveals; and (iv) that some authors employ the term not for its conceptual cogency but rather in the hope that it might give their work more visibility. All of this means that work using the concept should come with a handle with care label. The most important effect of these problems, I think, is that the concept has been asked to do too much work. It has been treated too often as a container for all social assets ranging from informal networks of social relationships, membership organizations, generalized social trust, macro institutional relationships such as contract law, etc. While these may all have a similar effect (of facilitating social interaction), they are quite different in and of themselves. The distinction is important I suspect that in development as elsewhere, concepts are more useful and more easily turned into action when they refer to causes, not effects. Hence it is hard to 1 More precisely it seems that rather than the Bank dedicating significant resources to work on social capital it is more accurate to say that certain people within the institution have devoted significant effort to promoting discussion of social capital and mobilizing external financial resources for this effort. 2 It oughtn t be too difficult to think of other institutions where a similar pattern applies.

3 justify using the same term to talk about a range of causes, even if they have a similar effect 3 put another way, analytically at least, not all social assets are conceptually the same. Indeed, an important mistake of the social capital satellite group that initially discussed the relevance of the concept for a social development strategy (World Bank, 1996) was to lump a whole range of assets as social capital. While aiming to be intellectually inclusive this muddied analytical discussion from the outset, and also helped generate a body of social capital research that, regardless of its quality (some of which was very high), was unable to convey a coherent message about this thing called social capital. If this is so, then might we need to give greater precision and specificity to what the concept refers to in order for it to be useful? From my own perspective, there are several notions caught up with the concept of social capital that are helpful. These include the following ideas: that a social relationship is a resource that can facilitate access to other resources and exclude others from such access; that the structure of an actor s set of social relationships maps neither easily nor automatically onto their class, gender, ethnic group or other positions; that the structure of these social relationships can be changed; that people can and do actively invest in their networks; and that changes in these social relationships can have effects on the disposition of power and other resources and on the way in which markets function.. The emphasis on the importance of such networks also means that organizations cannot be seen as homogenous actors rather they are comprised of individuals who maintain other relationships both within and beyond the organization. This not only challenges us to rethink how and why organizations act in the ways in which they do, it also blurs the boundaries between organizations there are no clear lines separating NGOs from the state, the state from businesses and political parties, peasant organizatins from local government agencies, and so on. The social capital debate very usefully draws our attention to the complicated ways in which organizations are linked to other organizations and interest groups. Underlying each of these ideas is the notion that an actor s social relationships are an asset, and that this asset has significant impact on: their access to other assets; their ability to turn those assets into enhanced welfare; and their access to institutions of the state, market and civil society. At the same time as being an asset, these relationships are also a constraint, in that they help structure your action: they can, for instance, mean that no matter how well specified your job description you will do other things on the job, and you may not do all your description requires, because your social relationships pull you in a different direction. This mean that in programs of institutional reform, what matters much more than getting the rules right is to get the practices right. These are not terribly complex ideas, but they do have implications for how we think about poverty, social exclusion, markets and governance. Inter alia 1. They hook up with discussions of the embeddedness of so-called real markets (Hewitt de Alcántara, 1992). They suggest that the structure of social relationships will influence relative competitiveness in markets, above by structuring access to information and patterns of reciprocal obligations. This has been shown to influence profitability for traders (Fafchamps and Minten, 2001, 1999), and also the relative unfreedom of poorer producers in agricultural markets (Hewitt de Alcantará, 1992). 3 Inter alia this observation would mean I would quibble with definitions of social capital as norms and networks facilitating collective action (Woolcock, 2002), for again this aggregates social structures, institutions and values under the same concept (social capital) because they have the common effect of facilitating collective action.

4 2. If the structure of social relationships affects the nature of real market practices, then it is also likely to structure real governance practices. This indeed is the lesson of Evans argument about the relationships between bureaucracy, entrepreneurs and industrial transformation (Evans, 1995), as well as the lesson that would be drawn from any casual review of who moves into and out of bureaucratic and technocratic positions as political regimes change. 3. A corollary implication and one supported by asset based approaches to poverty, livelihoods and survival strategies 4 - is that for individuals the structure of their social relationships greatly influences their ability to gain access to and control over resources and institutions (Berry, 1989). This will influence who has access to projects and project benefits. For me then, the most important idea in the social capital discussion is that the structure of social relationships matters very much in determining both how political and economic institutions really function, and how people are able to put livelihoods together. The particular attraction of the way in which this question has been framed in many social capital discussions is that: (a) it is not assumed that the structure of these social relationships can be easily explained by class, ethnicity, gender or the other categories so often used in social analysis; and (b) in post-putnam (1993) discussions it has increasingly been demonstrated that both the structure and effects of these relationships can be changed by interventions. This framing of the social capital discussion leads inevitably to the question if what you are really talking about here is social networks, why not just call them social networks? Conceptually it seems to me that while a case can be made for calling these networks social capital - because we are dealing with relationships in which people deliberately invest and that generate a stream of benefits - the conceptual case remains a tenuous one. There may, however, be a strategic reason for calling this social capital and one that is particularly relevant to the World Bank. To this point I now turn. Social capital and the World Bank I want to comment on three domains in which we might consider the relevance of the concept to the Bank. The first relates to the extent to which social capital might facilitate communication within the institution, and by doing so influence its culture. The second relates to the potential for investing in social capital. And the third relates to questions of analysis and impact assessment. Communication, language and sensibilities: concepts and institutional cultures It seems reasonable to claim that the social development group at the World Bank has long struggled to find a way of communicating with country, sector and research economists in the institution (and probably with a number of other technical groups also). As a result, it can be argued, social development has not had much impact on core tenets in the institution: the social development agenda has instead been one of defending special causes in the periphery, not one that constitutes part of the core agenda of the Bank. Indeed, one of the justifications given for the concept of social capital is precisely that it constitutes a linguistic device that can enable such a conversation (Woolcock, 1998). Given that eight years have passed since Serageldin and Steer (1994) published their initial piece suggesting that social capital was, along with produced, human and natural capital, one of the four pillars of sustainability, now is probably a good time to assess whether the concept has indeed had the effect of fostering a conversation that helps move a social development agenda closer to the core of the Bank s view of the world. 4 For instance, see Moser (1998) and Bebbington (1999).

5 Making this assessment is more easily done by insiders than outsiders. However, from the outside it seems that not much has altered in core Bank practice. Large operations seem to have changed little, and adjustment lending is on the increase. This of course may be because in terms of staffing, resources and legitimacy within the Bank structure, the social capital group remains wholly insignificant (Watts, 2001: 284). It may also be that the imprecision with which the concept has been used has meant that it is unlikely to affect other concepts. On the other hand, it may be that these are still early days and that elements of change can be found. It may be that the circulation of the concept within the institution has expanded the ways in which people think about development and the projects for which they are responsible. These are empirical questions and they are ones that the social capital group and SDV need to ask themselves: an impact assessment of the social capital debate so far. Whatever the conclusion of such an assessment (and it is one that is worth doing honestly), the suggestion that social capital could be a useful linguistic device leaves an important lesson: namely, that the words we chose to speak with matter. How we speak influences how we think: how we speak of development will thus influence what immediately comes to mind when we come to assess it. At an institutional level, how people speak within an organization affects the culture and sensibilities of the organization. So whether or not social capital is ultimately the best way of talking about the social foundations of a fairer and more humane world, it is incumbent on the group carrying forward a social development agenda to continue seeking a way of talking about their work that might permeate the languages, thoughts and practices of others within the institution. It is also incumbent (I would suggest) to find a language that not only changes how people think about project design (as the participation working group did) but also changes how they think about the dominant economic and political institutions undergirding development. The challenge is to change theory and thus all practice not just to change some practices. Loans: implications for investment To frame social capital as we have above means that generic discussions of investing in social capital are somewhat meaningless because all actors have social capital. The aggregate structure of these different endowments of social capital then affects how institutions are used, by whom and for whom, and how and by whom resources in society are accessed and controlled. If this is so, several points might follow. 1. All interventions will be affected by, and will in turn affect, these aggregate structures of social capital. 2. If aware of this, Bank interventions would explicitly aim to either (a) strengthen those forms of social capital likely to change patterns of access to assets and institutions in favor of poverty reduction and/or (b) dilute the effects of those forms of social capital that favor forms of access to assets and institutions that perpetuate poverty for others. Interventions of type (a) might, for instance: support membership organizations of the poor; facilitate interaction and exchange of experiences among poor people; facilitate links between poor people and agencies (public or private) that are concerned to support their access to resources and institutions; etc. 5 They might also build on existing ways in which people use social networks to manage their assets an approach which might lead to interesting institutional innovations. As just one example, a still untapped area in this sense is to understand how networks among migrants, and between migrants their homes, function 5 The list is far from exhaustive and appropriate interventions would depend on context.

6 and to then build resource management and mobilization institutions on the basis of these existing networks. 6 Interventions of type (b) might, for instance: foster public access to information that special interest groups have heretofore been able to monopolize or acquire before others; require broader participation of excluded groups in committees that determine or monitor public policies; strengthen ombudsman and other auditing institutions; etc. 3. The Bank needs to understand how such structures of social capital affect development outcomes in particular contexts (see below). There are clearly then many ways in which interventions could take existing forms of social capital into account. Rather than produce a long and boring list of these ways, the general point is that to understand the ways in which social networks are actually used by the powerful and excluded alike can open up a Pandora s Box of intervention possibilities. This, though, presumes that such understanding exists. Analysis and impact assessment Without wishing to open another thorny and painful discussion in the social development group, I think it is the case that the most significant implications of the social capital as social structure argument are for the whole enterprise of social analysis. While defining in an operational directive what social analysis is seems to me a rather strange and fruitless exercise, one of the things social analysis should do is to develop an understanding of how structures of social relationships affect patterns of access to resources, affect how public institutions operate, and affect how markets operate. Study of the latter two is still chronically underdeveloped in the social sciences. 7 Yet only through an understanding of the precise ways in which economic, political and administrative processes are embedded in social networks 8 will it be possible to design effective interventions and potentially viable programs of reform. It seems to me that the field is wide open for pitching social analysis at the level of ministries, financial markets, industries and so on. Done well, I suspect such work really would change how people think about development. And the Bank is peculiarly well placed to do this work, given the access it has to such institutions. Such work would need to be done both ex ante and ex post: both to improve the design of interventions, but also to understand their effects on the ways in which institutions operate post intervention. It is, however, an open empirical question as to whether the the social development group at the Bank currently has the analytical capacity to do such analysis, or whether the Bank as a whole has the desire to do them because they will inevitably make reflections on intervention much more complex. The social capital debate, more than the participation or NGO discussions in the Bank, potentially opens up a new and very fruitful area of analytical work for social development at the Bank and one that could (again, if done well) influence core concepts and institutional arrangements and procedures in the institution. This should be the social development group s goal, even if in much of the Bank this may be resisted. 6 One example of this would be the recent decision of the Bolivian micro-finance organization, FIE, to open a branch in Buenos Aires in order to provide Bolivian migrants working in Buenos Aires a safer and quicker means of returning remittances to Bolivia than their current networks give them. 7 Witness the many and recurring calls for more ethnographies of government, business, non-governmental and other organizations (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Watts, 2001; Markowitz, 2001). 8 For as the work of Evans (1995), Fafchamps and Minten (2001) and others shows, different relationships have different effects on markets and governance.

7 Social capital and a social development strategy Although it is perhaps slightly beyond the mandate of this paper, I wish to close with a brief reflection on any implications that the concept of social capital or more specifically issues to which it draws attention may have for a social development strategy at the World Bank. To me, the single most important point that the social capital discussion raises is that social structures affect how markets and public and private institutions operate. This is not a new lesson, but it is one that merits reiteration. It is also one that ought lie at the core of what is social in a social development strategy. For me, social development occurs when social relationships change such that: less people are poor; less people are (or feel) systematically excluded from the benefits that their societies deliver to others; and these reductions in poverty and exclusion, and enhancements in self-fulfillment, become more durable. Only with this strategic goal in mind can efforts to foster participation, to work with NGOs and civil society, or to promote community driven development have any sense. A social development agenda is thus more than a poverty reduction agenda; and a social development department has to be more than the sum of its parts. This of course is difficult terrain, but I think that it means that whether one wishes to use the other p word or not, at the core of a social development agenda is the question of power and how it affects development outcomes and processes. A social development agenda put into practice would be one that aimed to change aggregate structures of social capital such that the distribution of power changed in society in favor of the excluded. 9 While this cuts across each of the domains of opportunity, empowerment and security as laid out in the WDR 2001 (power, for instance, clearly affects who has more and less opportunity), a reasonable starting point is for SDV to take the empowerment section as its own. This is already a lot, because it would mean that governance (at least the real processes of governance) ought constitute one of the pillars (perhaps the pillar) of social development. 10 Yet this seems entirely appropriate. Indeed the Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) that has long been and still is (Woolcock, 2002) touted as a flagship of the social development approach, is not a service delivery project so much as a project which aims to shift relationships of power in processes of district level governance. Indeed, its ultimate significance will rest on whether it succeeds in doing so or not. All this may seem a far cry from social capital, but I think not. Underlying Putnam s early work (1993) was a concern for how regional governments in Italy gained more power vis-à-vis the center, and how they turned this power into economic success. A social development agenda would merely pursue the same set of questions for certain groups of people in society. References: Bebbington, A. J Capitals and capabilities: a framework for analyzing peasant viability, rural livelihoods and poverty. World Development Vol. 27(12): An interesting question arises as to whether this is social engineering or not and if it is engineering, then surely it is anathema to say that this is the business of social development. The dilemma may be more apparent than real, however, as in practice it is clear that the Bank, like all organizations that intervene in development, are in the process of promoting a particular vision of change (and of course in the macroeconomic sphere the Bank does this all the time). This not to say, though, that the Bank should aim to control all dimensions of this change. Rather it is to make a commitment to fostering pro-poor shifts in the relations of social power shifts that would open up opportunities that people would use as they see fit. In conceptual jargon, it is to open up more possibilities for human agency: to create more spaces for freedom. This, surely, is what empowerment is all about. 10 Within the current structure of the Bank, however, governance falls within poverty reduction and economic management.

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