Participation in community Landcare groups in the Philippines: a social capital perspective

Abstract

Membership in Community Landcare groups in the Philippines can be seen as an accumulation of social capital by farmers to improve their access to, and ability to implement, soil conservation and agroforestry technologies. An improved understanding of the factors affecting farmers' decisions to invest in such forms of social capital is likely to be helpful to agencies concerned with supporting these collective conservation farming efforts. A logistic regression model, based on household survey data from one municipality in central Mindanao, was used to analyse factors influencing farmers' investment in social capital in the form embodied in membership of a local Landcare group. The results indicate that the assumption of homogeneous and cooperative communities that underlies many community-based resource management approaches may not be valid in practice. Both individual and group-level characteristics lead to different degrees of investment in community-based activities such as Landcare. Differences between individuals affect their willingness to invest time and resources in social capital formation; middleaged farmers with somewhat less education but more land and a greater focus on farming were more likely to participate in Landcare groups. Differences between communities further affect individual incentives to accumulate social capital; some local communities were more likely to encourage individual members to augment their stocks of social capital, including through Landcare membership. Programs to assist rural communities in the formation of social capital for beneficial collective action need to allow for such individual and community differences.