摘要：The proliferation of research on social capital following the seminal work of Robert Putnam (1993) has produced an impressive body of results confirming the importance of social capital in many different domains of development. Putnam himself documented a striking connection between membership in organisations and government quality (Glaeser, 2001:34). The ‘rediscovery’ of social capital has seemingly provided a missing – perhaps powerful – explanatory notion to understand development processes better and to strengthen related policies, programmes and projects. The potential contribution of social capital, or in simple terms civic engagement and social connectedness, to development appears to be immense, as corroborated by rapidly growing empirical knowledge (Pantoja, 2000:1). In this connection Putnam (1998:v) notes, “[m]uch hard evidence has accumulated that civic engagement and social connectedness are practical preconditions for better schools, safer streets, faster economic growth, more effective government, and even healthier and longer lives.” In the same vein, empirical evidence shows that social capital represents a propensity for mutually beneficial collective action, which in turn derives from the quality of relationships among people within a particular group or community. Communities with high level of social capital produce superior outcomes in joint actions, it is claimed; and communities with low social capital can be assisted to build up stocks of this resource, so that their performance will also improve over time. Economic development, community peace, and democratic participation can be promoted in this manner, simply by investing in the stocks of social capital (Krishna, 2002:ix; Bhuiyan, 2004).
