In addition to a wealth of academic literature on local institutions and social capital, there have been a number of recent policy-oriented research efforts sharing similar objectives to the SDAR/FAO programme, and with which collaborative information exchanges have been established. These programmes are briefly described below.
The Social Development Department of the World Bank with the Poverty Group has carried out cross-national comparative research on local level institutions and social capital in Indonesia, Bolivia and Burkina Faso. A major contribution of the research was to develop a "framework for data collection and analysis" which could be employed to determine the relationships between local institutions, social capital, poverty and economic development.
For analytical purposes, the LLI classified institutions by affiliation and function, origin, type of organization, and degree of importance to the household, using membership in associations for a proxy measure of social capital. The field research focused on the more formal local organizations and associations to allow for quantitative measurement and comparative analysis. Positive correlations were found between membership in associations and household welfare.
In 1996, the World Bank's Social Development Department initiated the Social Capital Initiative to "operationalize the concept of social capital and to demonstrate how and how much it affects development outcomes"(I.Serageldin). Specific objectives were:
to assess the impact of social capital on project effectiveness;
to demonstrate that outside assistance can help in the process of social capital formation; and
to contribute to the development of indicators for monitoring social capital and methodologies for measuring its impact on development.
The eleven studies that constitute the empirical centre of the SCI examine the role that social capital can play in the provision of goods and services, rural development efforts, enterprise development, and the reconstruction or revitalization of social capital after conflict or political transition. The SCI also commissioned concept papers, the development of a "tool" to measure social capital (SCAT, the Social Capital Assessment Tool)3, micro- and macro-economic literature reviews, and an annotated bibliography.
The LORPA research programme of the Danish Centre for Development Research had the overall objective "to analyze and assess the role and capacity of different types of local organizations to bring about poverty reduction" (Webster 1998: 7).
Eight country studies were undertaken to assess a series of research questions, including: how different forms of state-local relations affect and shape the conditions for (success) of a rural development strategy with a strong pro-poor dimension; the role of identity and identity formation (ethnicity, gender, religion, occupation) as a basis for collective action amongst the rural poor; and, the role of national and international institutional actors in the generation/denial/control of 'political space' for local organizations through their advocacy of specific policies and use of particular development discourses.
At the methodological level, LORPA has developed a number of inter-disciplinary field work strategies including different types of mapping exercises for exploring the relationships between local organizations, organizing practices, and poverty.
The Department for International Development (DFID) of the U.K. is sponsoring farreaching normative and development work in the area of sustainable livelihoods, with many partners around the globe. A Policy, Institutions and Processes (PIP) subgroup was established as a forum for the interchange of ideas on: "the social and institutional context within which individuals and families construct and adapt their livelihoods." Research on one or another dimension of PIP is being carried out by the institutional members of the Sustainable Livelihoods Resource Group, including Oxford Policy Management, Natural Resources Institute, Institute of Development Studies (Sussex), and Overseas Development Institute.
The paper by Mary Hobley, "Unpacking the PIP Box" is a synthesis of the key issues brought out in seven papers commissioned by the PIP sub-group, as well as two papers commissioned by FAO for its Inter-Agency Forum on Sustainable Livelihoods (Siena 2000).6 In addition, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has a long history of innovative policy-oriented collaborative research on local institutions and rural development, particularly in the area of community-based natural resource management7.
|
1 |
"Social Capital and Development Outcomes in Burkina Faso, LLI Study, Working Paper No. 7, Social Development Department, WB, September 1999. "The LLI Study: Program Description and Prototype Questionnaires," LLI Working Paper No. 2, WB, 1998. D. Narayan and L. Pritchett, "Cents and Sociability - Household Income and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania," Policy Research Working Paper No. 1796, WB, 1997. |
|
|
2 |
SCI Working Paper Series, No. 1 - 13, Social Development Department, WB, 1996 - 2000. Krishna and E. Shrader, "Social Capital Assessment Tool," paper prepared for the conference on "Social Capital and Poverty Reduction", WB, June 1999. |
|
|
3 |
Main contributions of the SCAT methodology (taken from Krishna and Shrader 1999): |
|
|
|
1) |
Community profile which integrates participatory qualitative methods with a community survey instrument to assesses various dimensions of community-level social capital; |
|
|
2) |
Household survey which includes a 39-item battery on structural social capital and a 21-item battery on cognitive social capital; |
|
|
3) |
Organizational profile designed to delineate the relationships and networks that exist among formal and informal institutions, integrating semi-structured interview data with a scoring system for assessing organizational capacity and sustainability. |
|
4 |
N. Webster, "Introduction", in N. Webster (ed.), "In Search of Alternatives: Poverty, the Poor and Local Organizations," prepared for the Centre for Development Research Workshop on Local Organizations and Rural Poverty Alleviation (LORPA), Tune, Denmark, 1998. |
|
|
5 |
Livelihoods Connect: Policy, Institutions and Processes Dimension of Sustainable Livelihoods, www.livelihoods.org. |
|
|
6 |
Manor, J. 'decentralisation and sustainable livelihoods'; Newell, P. 'governance'; Hobley, M. 'organizational change and sustainable livelihoods' Goldman, I. 'micro to macro: policies and institutions for empowering the rural poor'; Kydd, J. 'sustainable livelihoods and new institutional economics'; Hussein, K. 'farmers' organizations and agricultural technology: institutions that give farmers a voice; and Ashley, S. 'livestock service delivery'. Bingen, J. Institutions and sustainable livelihoods; Thomson, A. Sustainable livelihood approaches at the policy level. |
|
|
7 |
See the IIED website for descriptions of their current collaborative research projects and lists of their publications. www.iied.org. |
|
