Associations or Informal Networks? Social Capital and Local Development Practices

Abstract

In Western contexts, associational life is mostly thought of as the historical and almost natural outcome of the accumulated experiences of bottom-up, horizontal cooperation among citizens. The attitudinal disposition to trust, reciprocate and cooperate is closely linked to the existence of certain structures, like associations and associational membership, which exactly indicate the overcoming of the collective action dilemma. Both attitudes and structures, thus, form the two main components within the social capital debate. As such, large numbers of associations and elevated levels of associational membership tend to go hand in hand with high generalized trust scores. Taken together they point to the existence of a vibrant civil society with large social capital stocks (Putnam 1993). Social capital, understood as the presence of dense, horizontal networks of civic engagement and generalized norms of trust and reciprocity, seems to be the driving force for democratic performance and economic prosperity (Putnam 1993; Knack and Keefer 1997; Harrison and Huntington 2000).