The social capital crash in the periphery:: An analysis of the current predicament in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Purpose: The current literature on social capital, especially among sociologists and political scientists, is characterized by a focus on its “civic” nature and consequently on the role that virtuous behavior plays in fostering democracy and national development. Robert Putnam’s book on the significance of the civic tradition in understanding Italy’s political history has set the tone for a new genre of literature on development. It is now being replicated, for example in the international development community, where the search for answers to the question of what explains a society’s progress continues. Efforts to operationalize social capital in order to achieve quantitative measures of its impact are also made in these circles. The notion that social capital is made up of a common currency of civicness, however, is both ethnocentric and misleading for policy or governance purposes. Social capital being manifest in the presence of trust and the existence of social networks and operationalized in collective action, which implies the confidence in sharing information and risks with others, may arise for reasons other than those associated with solving public problems arising from the competitive private interests of autonomous individuals, which is the prevailing assumption of the rational choice-based theory that now dominates the literature. There are at least three other reasons for the formation of social capital if the concern is analyzing its role in developing country contexts. The first is class solidarity growing out of a common sense of being exploited. This has historically been viewed as a cause for collective action. The second is the “moral economy” argument put forward by James Scott: people whose traditional values are being threatened by modernization get together to defend these values. The third is cooperation that emanates from the presence of strong communal ties, which help foster the development of a para-public realm, often in conflict with the norms underpinning the civic public realm. In short, there are several competing currencies of social capital that influence people’s readiness to engage in collective action. Which of these types of collective action people prefer and the extent to which they engage in any one of them is very much determined by the history of previous efforts to form social capital. Whether these efforts were successful or not will have an impact on the strategies that individuals choose next time around. Investments in social capital, therefore, are driven by the same considerations that influence behavior and choice in the financial marketplace. Social capital is based on the notion that something is being obtained in return for a gesture of goodwill. It takes a reciprocal effort to sustain it. If mutuality is lost, so is the trust that was being built with the initial act of goodwill. Trust, once destroyed, is difficult to rebuild; hence the significance not only of forming such capital, but also its ruin. Above all, social capital is by nature exclusive, i.e. it cannot incorporate everybody. It is often being fostered in the context of conflict. In short, social capital is not easily engineered by outsiders. It has to grow organically from the social dynamics that characterizes society. The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative explanation of the societal predicament of sub-Saharan African countries to those that have relied primarily on economic and/or structural variables. Using social capital as the dependent variable, it examines what forces produce social capital, what type of it prevails, and which group in society is more inclined towards one type rather than others. Empirical data were collected in Tanzania in 1990 from four different groups—commercial farmers, village farmers, peri-urban entrepreneurs and women groups—all of which are viewed as important players outside the state. Methods: The study shows that commercial farmers are the only group of respondents who display a civic approach towards solving problems facing them. They are driven to collective action by a genuine concern with policy issues and the need to deal with them in a rational fashion. They demonstrate an internal strength that is unparalleled in the other groups. Women groups show great internal solidarity, but their motive for joint action is largely driven by moral economy considerations, that is, the desire to protect or enhance traditional values. Moreover, their activities tend to be confined to very elementary livelihood issues and thus have little impact on the nature of the public realm. Village farmers, and to a lesser extent, peri-urban entrepreneurs, are primarily motivated by communal considerations, but unlike the other two groups, they display much less trust in each other. There is a serious crisis of confidence in the value of collective action among both village farmers and peri-urban entrepreneurs, but this does not mean that they are transcending communal loyalties in favor of some other type of collective action. On the contrary, they refrain from any collective action and prefer to act on their own to solve problems, many of which cannot be dealt with on such a basis. In explaining this loss in social capital that is so prevalent among groups that could play a crucial role in national development it is necessary to understand the political legacy that they are coping with. Policies that took away the spirit of self-reliance and self-help that was so prominent before and at independence among groups at both national and local levels by emphasizing the need for a centralized control of resource allocation and thus the preemption of voluntary action are according to respondents largely responsible for the destruction of social capital in Tanzania. The loss in Tanzania is a double one. It is not only the formal institutions which have collapsed but so have the informal networks that in many other countries may serve as a substitute to facilitate collective action. It is clear that the loss of trust in the Tanzanian countryside and its urban fringes has produced a general decline in social capital both at the micro and macro level. Individuals do not trust their neighbors to engage in solving many problems that are of a common nature. They instead rely on their own limited resources, typically what may be possible to mobilize within a narrow family setting. These resources are typically inadequate and problems of a common and public nature in the field of health, education and infrastructure remain unsolved. At the societal level there is a more generalized loss of social capital, which expresses itself in terms of a broad suspicion towards government as well as other modernizing institutions. Religious institutions which are often viewed as alternative trustworthy institutions and thus potentially of value for local development purposes have lost much of their public role. Instead, people flock to the “new” churches, often evangelical or prophetic institutions where salvation is being sought in an escapist manner. In sum, the negative externalities produced by the loss of trust in institutions and among people in Tanzania are very serious and are likely to be at the root of the country’s predicament as the only country in the world which without experiencing war, epidemics or a financial crash has plunged from being economically relatively well-off to being one of the world’s five poorest nations. Results: This study has important policy implications for what kind of “interventions” outside agencies or domestic actors in Tanzania may take. It is clear that the only group with enough internal strength to make a difference are the commercial farmers, who articulate a very “civic” outlook and reflect the type of rational calculations that we associate with game theoretic reasoning. Even if augmented with other members of the middle class, however, this group is quite small and it is difficult to see that it can carry the burdens of their country on their shoulders alone. Furthermore, if they were to become politically more active, they may easily be tainted by the “patrimonial” type of politics that still dominates Tanzania (and many other countries). Nonetheless, the commercial farmers have a potentially important contribution to make to economic development in the country. The marginalization of women means that human and social capital in the country is being wasted or misused. Greater efforts must be made to enhance the access that women have to public resources and to participation in public affairs. The loss of trust in both formal and informal institutions means that Tanzania poses an interesting challenge in terms of where to start rebuilding social capital. Accepting that it will not be an easy task, it may be that the weakness of informal networks provides an opportunity for giving priority attention to building up formal institutions that can make a difference. The judiciary is a case in point. Its upper echelons are already quite reliable and trusted, but its lower level judges are still easily corrupted and often operating in a manner that is detrimental to the cause of rule of law. To ensure a fairer resource allocation it may also be necessary to consider establishing alternative mechanisms to those controlled by the executive, because government operations tend to be based solely on patronage considerations. The model of autonomous development funds that is now being promoted in various African countries that supplement government expenditures is of special relevance in the current situation in countries like Tanzania. Conclusion: In conclusion, this paper draws attention to the need for acknowledging that games that people play are not only explained in conventional prisoner dilemma terms but need to be extended to consideration of games where the basis for choice is not only cognition but affection. Games based on affection tend to be exclusively zero-sum games, which ruin social capital much more quickly than cognitive games that offer the prospect of a positive-sum end to the game. Much of Africa’s societal predicament, therefore, can be explained with reference not only to social capital in general terms but also to the particular type of social capital that prevails and the type of “game” it gives rise to as people interact to deal with issues facing them as common problems. Especially problematic in Africa is that affective games are very inefficient in resolving disputes within groups or organizations. The notion of tit-for-tat that can be turned into a positive-sum game in the context of cognition-based or rational types of prisoners’ dilemma situations typically leads to either confrontation or withdrawal in the case of affective games. The tit-for-tat remains a pure zero-sum game where “retreat-for-tat” is often preferred as a way of avoiding embarrassment. As political scientists and sociologists are striving to strengthen the theoretical core of their respective disciplines, the presence of games that are played on a different bases than those conventionally modeled in game theory provides a challenge that at least those who are interested in comparative studies cannot escape.