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Bright Ideas
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By Michael Woolcock
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Poor people call on different types of assets for survival and mobility strategies. They use physical capital, such as plows, sewing machines, and pumps; and they use human capital in the form of knowledge about rainfall, weaving, and construction.
Social capital is an important third type of asset. Scholars differ in their definition of this term.
For example, some regard social capital as the social skills of individuals, while others hold it to be a feature of entire societies.
The consensus, however, is that social capital refers to resources that individuals could access by membership in particular types of networks. Trust, cooperation, reciprocity, support, information, and money are examples of such “moral resources,” as Albert Hirschman once called them.
Rich people, of course, are well endowed with all three forms of capital and typically have access to sophisticated institutions for managing risk, such as credit and insurance.
But how do the poor survive? Up against low income, poor education, few material assets, no insurance, and usurious credit, they become more mobile by using their social relationships.
Indeed, their social capital may be their most important resource. Being poor means living and dying in an environment that forces a person to rely on neighbors, family, their extended kin, and networks. Social capital is their primary strategy for dealing with life’s challenges and opportunities.
Social capital is not a single entity of which people have “more” or “less.” Rather, it is multidimensional. As such, it is useful to speak of three types of social capital: bonding, bridging, and linking.
Bonding social capital refers to connections to people like you. For example, classmates, work colleagues, and neighbors.
We turn to such people when we are sick or need somebody to do an errand, or when the baby sitter doesn’t show up at the last minute. A rich, cultivated set of bonding ties is really important for living a long, happy, and meaningful life.
Bridging social capital refers to connections to people who are not like you in some demographic sense. They include people in your phone and e-mail lists whom you do not contact regularly but are nonetheless crucial for your professional life.
Research evidence suggests that people with very rich sets of bridging ties within — and especially between — organizations tend to be more favorably evaluated by their peers, receive higher salaries, and get promoted faster.
Linking social capital pertains to connections with people in power, whether they are in politically or financially influential positions.
A person’s prestige, ability to get things done, and professional advancement often depend on ties to these elites.
Importantly, it is the extent to which people can call upon different types of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital that shapes their well-being.
People with no bonding, bridging, or linking relationships, for example, are hermits or outcasts. Elderly prostitutes left to beg and die in the streets of Kolkata are sad evidence of what happens to those who cannot turn to anyone.
Many expatriate professionals are likely to have strong bridging and linking ties gained at the expense of their bonding ties, for example, by traveling too much. Situations characterized by lots of bonding but no bridging are familiar to us as factions, cliques, or quasi-fiefdoms within organizations.
Illegal immigrants lead lives that are an example of bonding and bridging without linking: they often have an extensive network of personal and business contacts, but because of their status they cannot access government services to which citizens are entitled.
The lives of the poor are largely characterized by a rich set of bonding relationships, but little by way of bridging and, especially, linking ties. In the quintessential rural village, people can turn to one another for help.
But they lack diversified economic exchange networks and access to people in formal institutions, with the power to facilitate their participation in political life.
In isolated villages that are characterized by very constrained social ties—weak bridging social capital—new ideas or technologies such as improved seeds, fertilizers, or pumps take a long time to disseminate.
Where there are very rich and diverse sets of social networks connecting different villages, on the other hand, a good idea introduced in one place spreads rapidly throughout the whole community with a measurable and positive impact. Understanding networks is also crucial in urban settings.
For example, the effective introduction of safe sex technologies and education in slums and to truckers, sex workers, and other groups who are vulnerable to contracting and spreading HIV/AIDS—a crucial issue in Asian countries—requires an active appreciation of the centrality of the networks that underpin the disease vectors.
In light of these challenges, an important set of questions for development professionals includes the following. How can bonding social capital in poor communities be extended and broadened so that their members have access to new business ideas, suppliers, and markets?
How can more extensive bridging networks, in turn, be used to enhance the poor’s political leverage (linking social capital) so that they have a greater say in matters affecting their lives?
How might an understanding of different types of networks help stop the spread of social ills, including crime (such as through drug cartels or terrorist cells) and disease?
Recent large-scale studies have underscored the importance of social capital in the lives of the poor. The results of interviews with 60,000 poor people from all over the world are reported in the World Bank’s three-volume Voices of the Poor study, coordinated by Deepa Narayan.
These reports repeatedly show that the poor feel strongly that controlling their own organizations would improve the quality of their lives in terms of increasing their collective capacity to influence political decisions on issues affecting them.
In a more focused way, the Living Standards Measurement Survey, which the World Bank uses to measure poverty around the world, is now introducing modules on social capital for the first time.
A recently completed study of more than 7,000 households in Guatemala reveals that stark contrasts exist in the social capital available to those in different ethnic groups, regions of the country, and income levels.
The Guatemala study also confirms findings from other countries pertaining to persistent gender differences in levels of bonding and bridging social capital: men tend to have the bridging networks, while women tend to have the bonding networks.
This has important implications in case a husband is killed or injured. If he is the main breadwinner, then with his demise goes the set of extensive social ties that would have enabled the household to diversify risk.
This may be why female-headed households are often left so impoverished and vulnerable to the effects of disease, misfortune, and natural disasters. They are left to survive with a highly constrained set of social ties and a very limited set of social networks outside the village.
This is especially significant in cultures where being married into a man’s family means that the woman essentially disavows her original set of social ties.
Why should we care about any of these findings that are emerging from new research? Why should evidence of the relevance of social capital matter to us in development organizations?
Because social capital has an impact on basically everything about the lives of poor communities that we care about.
In the face of massive institutional failure, social capital is an important component of managing risk and opportunity, survival, and mobility. It also has a big impact on public service delivery, on whether teachers, nurses, and the police are likely to do their jobs effectively and impartially.
A lot of this depends on how accountable such professionals are to local communities, and how well they are able to act as mediators and translators between “the government” and “the community.”
Central to them being able to establish such a role is their capacity to be not just experts, but also relationship builders who can coordinate vastly different agents and agencies of expertise. Development is basically getting the incentives and social relations right in the process of helping the poor make social, economic, and political transitions.
More appropriate and effective incentives must be set, both for the poor and for practitioners delivering services, within a conceptual framework that takes the power of social relationships and contexts seriously.
Whether we fail or succeed in this task, however, we are likely to perpetuate old and generate new forms of conflict.
Empowered people—those who have become more articulate, confident, and better educated—will want to change the system, and this is very likely to be unsettling to those who have benefited from the status quo.
As such, effective formal and informal institutions for managing conflict are essential for ensuring that the differences and crises—that often accompany development—yield innovative and just solutions, not violence and destruction.
In conclusion, consensus is emerging on six points regarding social capital and its implications for economic development.
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This article is based on a talk Michael Woolcock delivered in August 2001 at ADB.| © 2008 Asian Development Bank Privacy | Terms of Use |
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