Social Capital and Public Policy – The Current Challenge Facing the Victorian Government

Social capital, since Putnam's 1993 work, has captured the imagination of policy‐makers the world over, and Australia is no exception. In 2005 the Department of Victorian Communities launched its Actions for Community Strengthening policy statement, which draws heavily on social capital theory. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the government's policy and critiques its failure to deal adequately with the causal relationship between social capital and its supposed community benefits. The article then seeks to isolate the missing factors through a look at recent research on volunteerism and argues that the institution of collaborative/interactive governance needs to be underpinned by sound socio‐economic reform.     

The Impact of Local Economic Structure on Community Philanthropy

This article explores how local economic structure directly and indirectly affects community philanthropy. Drawing on campaign data for local United Way (UW) affiliates at three points in time (1990, 2000, and 2010), the article tests the degree to which the relationship between economic structure and community philanthropy is mediated through local stocks of human resources and social capital. The results suggest that retail employment and industrial concentration negatively affect local UW campaigns, while nonlocal ownership positively affects UW campaign size. These measures of economic structure also indirectly influence local UW fund‐raising activities by affecting the levels of human resources and social capital. In the midst of global efforts to increase community‐based philanthropy, these findings have important policy implications for efforts to promote community solutions to social issues in changing economies.     

Advancing Public Policy for High‐Growth,Female, and Social Entrepreneurs

Findings from a large and growing body of entrepreneurship research offer insights for public policy and public officials and managers. Entrepreneurship policy is defined as measures undertaken to stimulate entrepreneurship in a region or country. The authors discuss generalizations from empirical research on three types of entrepreneurship activity that are vital for inclusive, sustainable economic growth: high‐growth (stressing economic impact), female (inclusive impact), and social (sustainable impact) entrepreneurship. High‐growth firms make up a small share of all entrepreneurial activity but create the majority of economic growth. Compared to their male counterparts, female entrepreneurs are fewer in number (one‐third of all entrepreneurs) and tend to start ventures with lower financial capital and growth expectations. Social entrepreneurs generally have high levels of education and pursue social objectives, often remedying market failures with innovative solutions. For each entrepreneurship type, the authors provide a definition, empirical generalizations, and implications for public policy.     

A Concurrent Analysis of Three Institutions that Transform Health Technology‐Based Ventures: Economic Policy,Capital Investment,and Market Approval

Drawing on institutional theory, this article articulates qualitative insights from a program of research on Canadian health technology‐based ventures to examine the rules that characterize economic policy, capital investment, and regulatory approval as well as the way these institutions enable and constrain the development of ventures at an early stage. Our findings clarify how economic policy integrates these ventures into the entrepreneurial domain, how capital investment configures them for economic value extraction, and how regulatory approval fully releases their market value. These findings help to revisit current policy modernization initiatives by calling attention to the convergence among the three institutions. Rather than operating solely as a source of constraints, these institutions provide a highly integrated market‐oriented space for health technology‐based entrepreneurial activities to unfold.     

Exploring Social Capital: as Concept and Practice in Australian Public Health Policies and Programs

Over the past twenty years interest has grown in the concept of social capital in international and Australian public policy. We explore how social capital is understood as a concept and used in practice for guiding policy development and program delivery in South Australian public health programs. The empirical research compared policy makers’ and practitioners’ understandings of social capital and how theories about social capital and health inequality were translated into practice in three case study projects. It found that there are shifting discourses between social capital and related concepts, including community capacity building, and social inclusion/exclusion. Policy makers reported less use of the concept of social capital in favour of social inclusion/exclusion reflecting changing political and policy environments where terms come into favour and then go out of fashion. In this transition period the two terms are often used interchangeably although there are some conceptual points of difference.     

The myth of social capital in community development

Abstract

This article argues that contemporary interest in social capital by community development theorists, funders, and practitioners is misguided and needs to be thoroughly rethought. It argues that social capital, as understood by Robert Putnam and people influenced by his work, is a fundamentally flawed concept because it fails to understand issues of power in the production of communities and because it is divorced from economic capital. Therefore, community development practice based on this understanding of social capital is, and will continue to be, similarly flawed.

The article further argues that instead of Putnam's understanding of social capital, community development practice would be better served by returning to the way the concept was used by Glenn Loury and Pierre Bourdieu and concludes with a discussion of how these alternative theories of social capital can be realized in community development practice.     

Does social capital increase public support for economic globalisation?

The dominant explanation of public attitudes vis‐à‐vis economic globalisation focuses on re‐distributional implications, with an emphasis on factor endowments and government‐sponsored safety nets (the compensation hypothesis). The empirical implication of these theoretical arguments is that in advanced economies, on which this article focuses, individuals endowed with less human and financial capital will be more likely to experience income losses. Hence they will oppose economic openness unless they are compensated by the government. It is argued here that including social capital in the analysis can fill two gaps in explanations relying on factor endowments and the compensation hypothesis. First, generalised trust – one key aspect of social capital – constitutes a personal endowment alongside human and financial capital. Second, structural social capital – another key aspect of social capital – can be regarded as a nongovernmental social safety net that can compensate for endowment‐related disadvantages of individuals. Both aspects of social capital are expected to contribute, for distinct reasons, to more positive views on economic openness. The empirical testing relies on survey data for two countries: Switzerland and the United States. For both countries, the results indicate that generalised trust has a strong, positive effect on public opinion of economic globalisation, whereas structural social capital has no effect.     

Rapid knowledge: ‘Bridging research and policy’ at the Overseas Development Institute

Numerous organizations advocate the need to ‘bridge research and policy’. Philanthropic foundations, national social science funding regimes and international organizations have sought to improve knowledge utilization. Similarly, research consumers such as NGOs and government departments complain of research irrelevance for policy purposes. The concern of this article is with ‘evidence informed policy’ within the field of international development in which the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), a London‐based think tank, forms the case study. Most think tanks are driven by the need to influence immediate political agendas but ODI has also developed organizational strategies of policy entrepreneurship that extend to longer term influence through creating human capital, building networks and engaging policy communities. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Network Structure and Governance Performance: What Makes a Difference?

Comparing and evaluating the performance of governance networks are important tasks for researchers and practitioners of network governance and public administration. Limited by the lack of network data across space and time, the study of network performance and effectiveness at the network level is not on pace with advances in theories and methodologies in network analysis. With a novel methodology to measure clean energy governance networks using hyperlink network analysis across the contiguous United States, this article collects a large sample of self‐organizing policy networks in the same policy domain across geographic locations. This article proposes that governance networks with high overall bridging and bonding social capital perform better. Regression analyses show that network structures have statistically significant effects on governance outcomes. States with high average closeness and average clustering in their governance networks are more likely to have faster clean energy development.     

Pay for Success: Diffusion of Policy Innovation for Social and Economic Stability

Across the United States, communities struggle with numerous social and environmental issues, while the funding to address these issues continues to diminish. Therefore, actors inside and outside of government are seeking new policy solutions to persistent social problems. Significant hurdles to new policies exist, however, including a lack of funding and a reluctance to take on the risks inherent in implementing new programs. A recent innovation in the policy sphere, pay‐for‐success (PFS) financing, has been able to overcome these hurdles. Policy innovation does not come easily, though, and change within government is often slow and methodical. What catalyzes jurisdictions to engage with PFS? By developing an understanding of the mechanisms and processes of PFS, diffusion scholars and practitioners can facilitate innovation within jurisdictions. Such innovation, which the federal government has an opportunity to facilitate, is necessary to shift business‐as‐usual service provision and enable greater social, environmental, and economic stability.     

Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia

Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to win votes and popular support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in explaining these parties' popular support. We argue that Islamic party platforms function as informational shortcuts to Muslim voters, and only confer a political advantage when voters are uncertain about parties' economic policies. Using a series of experiments embedded in an original nationwide survey in Indonesia, we find that Islamic parties are systematically more popular than otherwise identical non‐Islamic parties only under cases of economic policy uncertainty. When respondents know economic policy platforms, Islamic parties never have an advantage over non‐Islamic parties. Our findings demonstrate that Islam's political advantage is real, but critically circumscribed by parties' economic platforms and voters' knowledge of them.     

Evidence for Tackling the Complexities of Water Governance

Water policy and management decisions are increasingly challenged by uncertainties associated with climate change, changing demographics, and social values. This article discusses how research by water governance scholars supports and complements Rob M. Skinner's arguments about the complexities of water planning and policy making and the importance of stakeholder engagement. Specifically, it focuses on how this decision‐making context shapes the ways in which evidence is used and understood in water governance. To conclude, this article draws lessons for practitioners about the limitations of using evidence in water governance.     

Both glue and lubricant: Transnational ethnic social capital as a source of Asia-Pacific subregionalism

Social capital not only forms and functions at the individual, group, and organizational levels, but also permeates and transcends the political and geographic boundaries of nation-states. This paper examines transnational ethnic social networks based on ancestral and kinship ties as a form of social capital that facilitates economic growth and transformation in a transborder subregional context. Transnational ethnic social capital works by gluing multiple economic actors on opposite sides of a border together and by lubricating economic transactions among them. When purposefully mobilized by government policies, transnational ethnic social capital in turn induces more responsive and efficient policy initiatives and implementation. This paper also considers whether ethnic social capital is both a necessary and sufficient condition for successful transnational subregionalism by demonstrating its interaction with certain crucial complementary or contradictory factors.     

From Participatory Reform to Social Capital: Micro‐Motives and the Macro‐Structure of Civil Society Networks

Although a wide‐ranging literature explores the favorable effects of social capital, it is only relatively recently that systematic attention has been directed to the manner in which social networks emerge and the consequent implications for civic engagement and collaborative governance. This article employs advanced social network statistical models to examine civic network emergence following a participatory reform in Los Angeles. Findings suggest that the reform fostered a number of favorable network attributes supportive of democratic participation. At the same time, subtle but ubiquitous effects of socioeconomic sorting had the unintended and undesirable effect of elevating higher‐status actors within the emergent civic network. These findings suggest that macro‐level policy interventions are required to foster the development of ties that promote cross‐talk among socioeconomically distinct community groups.     

Capitalism,nature, socialism a theoretical introduction∗

This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over‐production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis‐induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist”; theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, under‐production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis‐induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society.

While the two processes of capital over‐production and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements”; as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism”; throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post‐Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self‐consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific”; discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post‐Marxist discussions of the problem of capital's use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modern world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific”; discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non‐capitalist or anti‐capitalist, constitute “civil society,”; which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.     

Reforming the French welfare state: Solidarity,social exclusion and the three crises of citizenship

The article explores recent debates about citizenship and social provision in France. It examines the essential concepts comparable to ‘social citizenship’, as understood in British debates, and the role that they have played in the development of the French welfare state. Its conclusions are threefold. First, social provision in France is founded on the principle of solidarité, which holds that all citizens face a series of social risks (unemployment and illness) that make them dependent on one another. Second, as the traditional insurance principle (the core of the French welfare state) is founded on socio‐economic conditions (concerning the nature of social interdependence and social risk) that no longer exist, the emergence of these social ills has led to not one but three crises of citizenship: a crisis of coverage, of legitimacy and of participation. Third, while it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, recent policy reforms suggest that the difficulties faced by French welfare are encouraging moves towards the British model of tax‐based (rather than insurance‐based) financing of social provision.     

Public Administration Scholarship and the Politics of Coproducing Academic–Practitioner Research

Developing greater cooperation between researchers and practitioners is a long‐standing concern in social science. Academics and practitioners working together to coproduce research offers a number of potential gains for public administration scholarship, but it also raises some dilemmas. The benefits include bringing local knowledge to bear on the field, making better informed policy, and putting research to better use. However, coproduction of research also involves managing ambiguous loyalties, reconciling different interests, and negotiating competing goals. The authors reflect on their experience of coproducing a research project in the United Kingdom and discuss the challenges that coproducers of research confront. They situate the discussion within a consideration of traditions of public administration scholarship and debates about the role of the academy to understand better the politics of their joint practice. Thinking about the politics of coproduction is timely and enables the authors to become more attuned to the benefits and constraints of this mode of research..     

Social Capital and Regional Economies in Britain

Is social capital a prerequisite for prosperity? This paper analyzes social capital and economic performance in the British regions. Like Italy, Britain has a north–south economic divide. Are these differences caused by unequal stocks of social capital? This paper provides limited support for the hypothesized relationship between some indicators of social capital (especially trust and civic associations) and economic performance. Economic associations, however, are negatively correlated. This highlights shortcomings in social capital theory in terms of transferring the concept to new settings, the mechanisms linking social capital to production and the translation of social capital into public policy.     

Overcoming resistance to resistance in public administration: Resistance strategies of marginalized publics in citizen‐state interactions

There has been a general resistance to resistance studies in public administration (PA) research. Although previous research has documented instances of selective policy implementation by PA practitioners that put minority groups at a comparative disadvantage, we still have a limited understanding of the different ways in which these groups contest discriminatory administrative practices especially within non‐western developing countries. To address this gap, in this article, I discuss the various strategic responses the Khawaja Sira—a genderqueer group of Pakistan—employ in their interactions with the frontline police workers to contest their hyper‐surveillance and moral policing. The discussion illustrates that while Khawaja Sira mostly rely on individual acts of contestation in their interactions with police officers, the emerging leadership of the Khawaja Sira is enabling emergence of new forms of resistance based on social capital and collective protests. In addition to contributing to the limited literature on citizen perspectives and LGBT issues in PA research, the theoretical framework of resistance presented here can serve as a good template to analyze citizen responses to discriminatory frontline practice in other sociopolitical contexts as well.     

Are Discrimination and Social Capital Related to Housing Instability?

Existing studies examining social capital and housing instability have overlooked structural factors such as discrimination, providing an incomplete explanation of the relationship between social capital and housing instability. This study addresses this limitation by exploring how discrimination and social capital are related to housing instability. This study is a secondary analysis of data collected during the Atlanta Neighborhood Pilot study. The sample consists of mostly African American adults who resided in the Atlanta metropolitan area in 2013 (n = 691). After controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, residential mobility, and public assistance, stepwise logistic regression identified social capital and discrimination as significant predictors of housing instability. Lower social capital and higher everyday discrimination scores were associated with increased odds for housing instability. Individuals 35 or older, those with annual incomes between $25,000 and $50,000, and those who reported receiving public assistance during their lifetime also had increased odds for housing instability. Findings identify characteristics of individuals vulnerable to housing instability and suggest that social capital development as a housing intervention warrants further exploration. These findings can be utilized by policymakers and practitioners to better target funding and to create efficient systems better equipped to deploy early homelessness prevention interventions.