Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which discussions of social capital have emerged within the World Bank, and how they interacted both with project practices and with larger debates in the institution. These debates are understood as a ‘battlefield of knowledge’, whose form and outcomes are structured but not determined by the political economy of the Bank. Understanding the debates this way has implications for research on the ways in which development discourses are produced and enacted, as well as for more specific discussions of the place of social capital in development studies. The article concludes with a reflection on implications of these debates for future research, policy, and practice.

Notes

We leave open the question of whether discursive shifts and any attendant organisational changes are (or are not) more readily accomplished in other types of organisations.

Harriss's book invokes Ferguson's argument in the notes to its introduction and its conclusion [ Harriss, 2002 : 2, 118, 124n].

The rise is also attributed to less than scholarly motivations among academics and researchers who see in social capital a language they may use to ensure the publication of their work.

Of course in other ways the Bank is an acutely political institution, with acutely political effects.

Task managers in the Bank are those people responsible for ensuring the inception, execution and completion of an activity.

See for instance, World Bank 2000a and World Bank 2000b. See also articles by economists in Rao and Walton [ 2004 ] on the role of culture and identity in shaping development outcomes.

Many also still identify with the core of the infrastructure argument too.

On the intellectual history of social capital, see Woolcock [ 1998 ] and Farr [ 2004 ].

Putnam, personal communication [June 2002]. In the early 1990s, Putnam was a member of Serageldin's advisory group, which met periodically to keep the vice president abreast of the latest thinking in academia, and was also in quite regular communication with Bruno.

Serageldin hosted several high-level meetings/seminars of senior academics and Bank staff on social capital, which culminated in a collection of new and ‘classic’ (and sometimes critical) papers co-edited with the development economist, Partha Dasgupta [see Dasgupta and Serageldin, 2000 ].

Some 19 people made up the core team, dozens more were regularly active, and some 300 attended an international seminar organised by the Group in 1992 [ Bhatnagar and Williams, 1992 ]. By 1996, over 200 staff and consultants were involved in contributing simply to one publication of the group [World Bank, 1996 a: xii].

This is not to deny the existence of long-standing traditions in the social sciences that would have something to say about development alternatives. It is, however, the case that the language of these social sciences had then, and still has, little purchase inside the institution.

Examples here include: Uphoff [ 1992 ], Bebbington [ Bebbington and Perreault, 1999 ], Fox [ 1996 ; Fox and Gershman, 2000 ], and Carroll [ 2001 ; Carroll et al., 1996 ].

It should be noted that significant parallel developments were taking place within mainstream economics [see Platteau, 2000 ] at the same time that ‘social capital’ was rising in popularity within the non-economic social sciences. Institutions [ North, 1990 ], networks [ Borjas, 1992 ], norms [ Platteau, 1994 ], and culture [ Greif, 1994 ] (re-) entered the development economics literature through articles in prestigious journals by scholars concerned with the ‘failure’ of many east European transition countries, the persistence of poverty in a world of plenty, and the remarkable success of certain East Asian economies and particular ethnic diaspora communities. The strategising of the Bank's social scientists, now couching their arguments in social capital terms, thus found a more receptive audience in the mid-1990s among orthodox development economists than they would have in previous decades.

Steer was Director of the Environment Department, within which the Social Policy Division then sat. Each existed under Serageldin's Vice-Presidency.

The creation of the group had much to do with the urging of Davis and support of Steer, who chaired the group.

A later initiative to ask the director of the Research Group to write a paper on social capital and poverty was another such strategic move; see Collier [ 1998 ]. Narayan was introduced to Pritchett some years earlier through her research assistant at the time, Jonathan Isham, now a prominent economist of social capital in his own right based at Middlebury College, Vermont.

This study was later published in Economic Development and Cultural Change as Narayan and Pritchett [ 1999 ].

Trust funds are pockets of money that exist in the Bank, financed by different member governments, and for which Bank staff can apply to cover work not financed by core budget. This pattern in which member governments use grant resources to support work of particular interest to the government, and in many cases related to that government's own beliefs about development, has also been documented for the case of Japan and its support for the research that went into the Asian Miracle study [ Wade, 1996 ]. Somewhat differently to the case Wade describes, the Norwegian officials did not advocate for this research – rather they endorsed a proposal that came from the Social Policy Division.

More generally, the Social Development Department (and the earlier Social Policy Division) have enjoyed support from Scandinavian donors – whose own foreign aid programmes, and indeed own notions of state–society relationships at home, have emphasised an important role for participation, civil society and popular organisation. Notably, a Danish Trust Fund supported the second round of social capital research in the Social Development Department, the so-called Social Capital Initiative.

There is still considerable resistance to participatory poverty assessments (for example, Robb [ 2001 ]) among some senior economists at the World Bank.

Staff who, notably, had earlier been members of the Participation Group

See Denning [ 2000 ] for an account of the strategising and ‘storytelling’ required to introduce even relatively benign issues into the World Bank.

There is a certain tendency to hire in consultants to do the reading (that is, write ‘literature reviews’) for permanent staff.

Somewhat ironically (and perhaps counterproductively for this group) it is this same website that has served as a (if not the) primary source of material for ardent external critics of the social capital initiative within the Bank [for example, Fine, 2001 ; Harris, 2002 ]. Events were often co-sponsored by other units within the Bank, including the World Bank Institute (the Bank's education and training arm), and the Social Capital Initiative.

Once again, as in the earlier work on social capital, this study was financed primarily by external agencies aiming to promote their concerns within the Bank: these were the UK Department for International Development, Swedish Sida, the MacArthur Foundation and indirectly the Swiss Development Corporation. Several departments within the World Bank also contributed.

Michael Woolcock and Christian Grootaert, though their approaches to the concept were not identical; the latter was included in the WDR team more for his econometric skills and work on risk management. The lead author of the empowerment section was Monica Dasgupta.

Stern is now Second Permanent Secretary and Managing Director, Budget and Public Finances, at the UK Treasury and Head of the UK's Government Economic Service.

As Stern himself has done over several decades in rural India; see Lanjouw and Stern [ 1998 ].

Ghani, pers. coms., 1999 and 2000.

As documented in a review conducted by the Poverty Group at the Bank in 1999–2000.

See for instance discussions in Fox and Gershman [ 2000 ] for cases of such innovation, as well as cases of projects where staff are less inclined to change practice. Mehmet, Tahiroglu, and Li [ 2002 ] raise some similar issues, but in a much less critical manner.

Similar observations would apply to other efforts at similar innovation, such as work with indigenous organisations and community forestry enterprises in Mexico, and programmes with farmers and peasant organisations in Senegal and Burkina Faso.

This is Scott Guggenheim.

By bridging social capital, Woolcock and Narayan [ 2000 ] refer to supra-communal linkages among social organisations; linking social capital refers to relationships with external state and non-state actors.

The PRI is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the governing party in Mexico for most of the twentieth century.

In the Mexican case the project began in a similar way, but then the task manager was changed, which also weakened the social component of the project [see also Fox and Gershman, 2000 ].

These are not trivial issues. See for instance press discussions of the departures of insiders criticising the Bank's ideas [ Ringle, 2002 ; Kahn, 2001 ].

In the case of this article three of us do or have worked in the Bank, making the argument autobiographical while also aiming to be analytical. This is a difficult combination, making the paper at best an exercise in participant observation, at worst one in self-legitimation based on a selective reading of institutional history and a certain defending of friendships.

An encouraging example is recent World Bank work on social exclusion and poverty in Brazil [ World Bank, forthcoming ], which explicitly recognises ‘class politics’ and ‘structural inequality’, and encourages both land reform and asset redistribution as part of the policy response. The Bank's poverty assessment in Guatemala [ World Bank 2003 ] raised similar issues.