Progress in Development Studies 4,4 (2004) pp.

343 – 349

Progress reports

Social capital and development

studies 1: critique, debate, progress?
Anthony Bebbington
Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, UK

This is the first in a series of short notes on social capital in development studies.
Departing from three recent critical interventions (Fine, 2001; Harriss, 2002; Studia
Africana, 2002) this first note reflects on the nature of the debate about the concept,
for I think that the tone of the debate tells us much about the issues at stake. The
second note will take a more theoretical focus, reflecting critically on the adequacy
of recent efforts to use social capital as an analytical category in development studies
and addressing the potential for bringing Bourdieu into these discussions – a move
that several critical interventions imply is essential if the concept is to have any uti-
lity. The third report will discuss one of the core claims made by proponents of the
concept, and consider whether there is any evidence that it fosters cross-disciplinary
conversation, research and action.
In this opening note, I argue that there is a danger that current critical debate on
social capital – in particular its clever and at times not-so-clever acrimonies – might
be read as playing the fiddle while Rome burns. I suggest that it is important for all
involved to be modest, reflexive, self-critical and, on these bases, creative. I comment
first on questions of tone and engagement, then on questions of conceptual choices in
framing research programmes and finally on the far larger and longstanding chal-
lenges at hand that are raised by these debates on social capital.

I Debating social capital: personal, political, passionate

The picture I have painted in this respect is both scathing and cynical but there is good reason to be
angry. (Fine, 2002: 28)


Address for correspondence: Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of
Manchester, Manchester, M13 9QH, UK. E-mail: anthony.bebbington@man.ac.uk

C
W Arnold 2004 10.1191/1464993404ps094pr
344 Social capital and development studies 1

One expects passion in development studies – perhaps also a bit of anger and indig-
nation at the inequity of everything. This is as it ought be in a field where academics
engage in research because of motivations that go beyond the professional and the
intellectual. Anger can, though, polarize and distort communication. It can lead to
oversimplified arguments, elicit defensive responses and lead to postures of mutual
disrespect and dismissiveness. It seems to me that this has happened in the some-
times quite charged debates around the concept of social capital, at least as they
play out in development studies.
Why this anger? Of course we cannot know, but it is perhaps overdetermined.
There can be little doubt that part of it is related to a more general antipathy to
the World Bank. The fact that in development studies the concept of social capital
has received the most concentrated attention at the Bank leads to an automatic coup-
ling of critiques. This coupling is explicit in the critical interventions of Harriss
(2002), Fine (2001) and Roca (2002), and thus also in this note. Critiques of
the Bank’s salaries, its failure to reduce poverty significantly, its adjustment-based
programmes . . . all these permeate discussions of the concept (see Fine, 2002;
Harriss, 2002; Roca, 2002). The anger is also intellectual.
Partly this is anger at what is perceived as a lazy use of a concept. It is also anno-
yance at the Bank s perceived selective reading of intellectual history, a reading
in which Putnam’s and Coleman’s notions of social capital are prominent, and
Bourdieu’s more socio-political notion all but absent. There is also anger deriving
from more general perceptions of what is happening in the academy – that research
is being driven by financial need and professional ambition as much as by scholarly
motivation. The rise and rise of social capital is seen as an example of this trend. The
anger perhaps also derives from a sense that other theoretical frameworks are being
ignored, and the belief that only these theoretical frameworks offer any basis on
which to build alternatives to contemporary forms of exclusionary capitalism.
There is something legitimate to each of these reasons for anger, but I would
suggest that they are overstated and that, whatever the case, they lead to interven-
tions that have not always been constructive. Mostly they preach to the converted,
while effectively limiting serious discussion and debate among people with positions
that, though they differ in some respects, are more similar than might often appear at
first sight. Critique is at the core of intellectual debate – but for critique to be effective
the authors whose work is being challenged need to feel they are being discussed
fairly. If they do, then they are more likely to anticipate further fair treatment in
the next round of discussion – and if they expect that, they will engage; if they do
not, they are less likely to.
I insist, the reasons for more general anger at the disappointments of develop-
ment (and of the World Bank in particular) are absolutely justified. Whether
50 years are enough or not, they are certainly a long time, and the fruits of those
50 years are not great. The stakes are very high – and if the purpose for engaging
in development studies is to engage with those problems of development and to
try to contribute something, then – as Fine’s (2001) critique implies – the way we
frame our interventions ought not to be based on the desire to attract professional
attention and acclaim but rather to the furthering of (relevant) scholarly enquiry.
This criterion applies not only to our choice of concepts, but also to the choices
we make about how to intervene. Life is too short, and some people’s lives are far
shorter than ours.
 A. Bebbington 345

II Naming and framing research problems

The day I first began drafting this note I had been in an examination of a student’s
doctoral research proposal. One of the written comments on the proposal asked
for greater clarity in problem framing – it suggested that such clarity would come
by being clearer on ‘Which literatures does [the student] want to interrogate, what
“fights” does [the student] want to pick?’. This question is also relevant to under-
standing at least some of the social capital debate. Indeed, amidst the anger and
name-calling there is also scope for reflecting more broadly on why certain
languages emerge in particular institutional settings, and thus about how to interpret
these languages.
The first reason for the rising use of a social capital language is relatively straight-
forward. People frame proposals in the languages of ‘Calls for Proposals’ and of the
funding institutions behind them. I have had colleagues whose real interests lie in
class formation and labour, but who, in order to access funding from health insti-
tutes, have presented proposals for research on alcohol abuse among workers
under stress – in the process, they were able to continue looking at labour issues.
It seems to me that the same dynamic was at work in the World Bank’s Social Capital
Initiative (Grootaert and van Bastelaer, 2002) – a number of people framed research
in the rubric of social capital, in order to be able to do work they wanted to do any-
way. So some of these studies were never primarily research projects on social
capital, nor ones that engaged seriously with the theoretical problems associated
with the concept. Yet several critics have viewed the Initiative as an important win-
dow on how the Bank thinks about social capital (Fine, 2001; Harriss, 2002; Roca,
2002). I suspect the social processes behind the generation of research products are
too complex for the outputs to be understood this way.
Secondly, if this is the explanation for some of the use of the concept of social
capital, it is less than surprising that there are weaknesses in how the concept is
deployed. But there are other constraints on the quality of social research at the
Bank. There is only a handful of social scientists in the Bank’s research complex
who have reasonable amounts of time to think and write. The vast majority of
the social development group do not have such time and when they do get a
few weeks here and there to write and think, such time is generally paid for by
resources external to the Bank. The very patchy quality of the research emerging
from this group is clearly indicative of this. In such a context, the Bank is very
unlikely to be a source of intellectually significant research into the social dimen-
sions of development.
Thirdly, while some authors framed proposals in terms of social capital in order
to access funds from a ‘social capital initiative’, others have chosen this conceptual
language because of the fights they want to pick and the conversations they want
to have. They would suggest that it is this dynamic that explains much use of the
concept within the World Bank (Bebbington et al., 2004). Initially the concept was
incorporated in order to strengthen two on-going agendas within the institution.
On the one hand, Ismail Serageldin promoted discussion of social capital in the
Bank partly because the notion that social capital is an asset complemented his
ongoing effort (in which he had already mobilized the language of natural capital)
to argue that measures of national wealth had to go well beyond income-based
approaches. A little later, some social development professionals in the institution
346 Social capital and development studies 1

pounced on social capital as a new language for talking about participation, civil
society and local organizations and for arguing why these were important in
development. They felt that here was a concept that might be more effective in
engaging in conversations with those many parts of the Bank that still felt the
social development group to be, above all, an irrelevant nuisance.
The story is more complex than this – and one must be careful in attributing
motivations to human agents – but the more general point is that in large measure
this was a language mobilized for struggles within the Bank. And given the pol-
itical economy of language in that institution, for those who work inside the Bank
there are only a limited number of languages that can be used when pushing for
organizational change (those pushing for change from the outside have more
options, if still not limitless ones: Fox and Brown, 1998). This was not a language
mobilized in the first instance in order to colonize social research or development
studies in general – the strategy was rather more inward looking. Of course, this
very ‘inward lookingness’ (reflected in World Bank publications having bibliogra-
phies replete with other World Bank documents, and in frequent failures to
engage with other scholarly literature) can be justifiably criticized for other
reasons.
Intentions do not explain consequences and, as Fine notes, along the way a num-
ber of people (within the Bank) got on the social capital train in the hope of furthering
their professional career within the institution. In some cases, this professional
agenda was directly coupled with their political agenda – a genuine determination,
to the point of obsession, to ‘change the Bank’ and to build their reputation, status
and power on the basis of this. In other cases, perhaps particularly among some
economists, the motivation was more professional than political. In yet other cases,
some economists engaged in the discussion in the hope of capturing it and derailing
it. Ironically perhaps, one sensed that in these cases the economists shared some of
the same concerns as Fine and Roca – that this was a sloppy concept, sloppily used.
Their agenda was to give it rigour – but a rigour that would steer it towards more
orthodox positions within economics.
In this sense, the social capital discussion, like the sustainability discussion (and
more than earlier ones on participation and civil society), was a real battlefield of
knowledge inside the Bank (Bebbington et al., 2004). One needs to appreciate this
– and also the longer struggles and alliance-building exercises of which the battle
is a part – in order to understand what was written, why, when and perhaps
above all by whom. Furthermore, it is still an open question as to how to judge
which of the agendas involved will ultimately be best served by these social capi-
tal debates. At the very least an argument could be made that those with a ‘left
leaning’ agenda have so far fared well, as the Bank begins to talk more about
empowerment, and as some senior economists (and in this Roca is right, I think)
do begin to think differently about development. The ultimate indicator,
though, will be whether Bank-funded projects and programmes change or not.
This is something that absolutely needs to be studied. Whatever the case, the
explanation of any such changes will lie as much in the discursive success of
social capital – what work was it made to do most successfully – as in its concep-
tual cogency.
 A. Bebbington 347

III And the bigger issues . . . the stagnation of explanation

In discussions of social capital, the notion of being ‘one of our group’, the ideological clubbiness that
automatically assumes an intellectual and ethical demonization of one’s theoretical opponent, has
helped perpetuate stagnation in explanatory frameworks. (Roca, 2002: 12, my translation)

Albert Roca’s observation in the quotation above seems to me very important. Too
much academic debate seems to fall into camps of this kind, and certainly debates
on social capital in development studies are no exception. Again it seems entirely
appropriate that in such discussions we each have groups with whom we identify
more, and less. But the tendency to have certain groups whom one never criticizes,
and others who one always criticizes is less than helpful and, as Roca suggests, leads
to continued stagnation in the quality of analysis.
In this respect it is too easy for an advocate of social capital to simply say to critics
‘Ah, but what would you recommend when you walk into a village where half the
population is suffering from AIDs?’ or ‘but what feasible alternative economic policy
would you suggest?’. Nonetheless, it is relevant that extended critiques (e.g., Fine,
2001; Harriss, 2002) say little regarding alternative development strategy, and
(which is more surprising given the assertiveness of their critiques) make only sche-
matic suggestions for analytical and theoretical alternatives. Simply to make generic
calls for bringing in marxian political economy and questions of class politics seems
insufficient, not least because of the only patchy analytical and policy successes of
such approaches to date.
It is likewise too easy for critics to argue that social capitalists elide any real reflec-
tion on the structure of the underlying economy and to suggest (or strongly imply)
that for this reason, these social capitalists are ultimately endorsing a conservative
agenda (wittingly or not) – that they are on the wrong side, to refer to Harriss’s asser-
tion that it all boils down to ‘which side are you on’ (Harriss, 2002: 13). But again, it is
relevant that the work on social capital that is more explicit in claiming more social
democratic credentials fails to engage questions of economy and alternative econ-
omic arrangements in any serious way. In this sense, this work reproduces some
of the lacunae that characterized earlier populist approaches to development.
Just as those more critical of social capital are prone to reject out of hand much
work using it, it is also too easy for those who see possible utility in it to skate
over explanatory inadequacies in the ways in which it has been used. Yet, if there
is to be any hope of ‘progress’ in development studies using the concept, then
such inadequacies must be engaged and worked with. This is a theme that will be
taken up in the second report in this series.
Similarly, there is the question of ethnocentrism, a theme addressed by a recent
primarily Spanish language collection of papers on social capital (Studia Africana,
2002). The fact that while studies funded by the World Bank use the concept most
social research in and on Africa does not, is very significant (Fine, 2002; Roca,
2002). More generally, the extent to which many of the concepts bandied around
in these debates – social capital, class politics, civil society to name a few – might
be ethnocentric is a critical question. The issue of what might be rescuable from
these concepts, and what can be built from more reflexive and careful engagement
with development and society as encountered, is vitally important. As the editor
of the special issue of Studia Africana notes, what is at stake is to ‘discuss in depth
348 Social capital and development studies 1

the effectiveness of current and future research that aims to address the social and
cultural conditions of development’ (Roca, 2002: 12).
The social capital agenda – for some at least – has been an attempt to understand
the social and cultural dimensions of development processes. While it may be near-
ing the end of its useful life in this regard, there are themes in some of this social capi-
tal research, and lessons deriving from how it has been debated, that are of
continuing relevance. Here I note three.

1 Fine (2001) is surely correct in suggesting that for some social scientists concerned
with development, part of the interest in social capital derived from its implicit
concern for more empirical material and grounded analysis. These were scholars
and students impressed by critiques such as those of Escobar (1995) and Ferguson
(1990), but ultimately not satisfied by them precisely because of their heavy focus
on discourse and their disabling conclusions about programmes for social
change. They sought a language for being critical and relevant at the same
time. This still seems an important agenda.
2 The search was for meso-level concepts that would facilitate analyses that: were
less sweeping than either those of postmodernism or neoliberalism (Bebbington,
2000); stayed closer to empirical and context-specific variation without arguing
that everything was different; would allow a language for the comparative analy-
sis of cases; respected notions of both agency and structure; and would build on
the more critical concerns of the literatures on social movements, NGOs and civil
society without using difficult to define organizations as a unit of analysis. Fine
(2002: 27) doubts the success of such efforts at empirically grounded mid-range
theory, but it can be argued that the need for such forms of analysis remains,
whatever the conceptual language they use. Grand narratives are unhelpful
and lend themselves to authoritarian forms of social intervention. It is distinctly
unfortunate that social capital has often become one more grand narrative; and
that it is often countered with other grand narratives.
3 There was a motivation to find a language to help bring together discussion of the
social, political and economic without ultimately elevating just one of these
spheres as the most causally implicated in the production of the other two (some-
what contra Putnam). This challenge of bringing together the socio-political and
the economic continues to be a very real one. For even if social capital research
has said little in practical detail about alternative economic arrangements, the
same can be said for work on social movements, discourse and other critical
encounters with development. As some have argued, unless critical development
studies can contribute to thinking through alternative, and politically feasible,
economic and social arrangements then it will fail (cf. Edwards, 1989, 1994) just
as so many of the programmes of the actors it has long championed have also
failed. The challenge of finding a conceptual language to speak across the social,
political, cultural and economic, the conceptual and the practical, is still then a
real one.

One wonders whether any of the agendas currently on the table are adequate in these
regards. Indeed, the verdict from the modern history of development must be that
nobody has a monopoly (indeed, not even significant stock) in practically adequate
theory nor in the moral high-ground (much as some like to claim it). In such a
 A. Bebbington 349

scenario a heavy dose of humility is probably in order for all. This is not one more
naı̈ve call for relevance, nor a recall to the pragmatists’ notion that in the end the
value of theory is determined by its usefulness. But it is to say that the intellectual
and political challenge is one to be engaged collectively and with a certain degree
of modesty. This means learning from each other, taking the other’s point of view
seriously, not trying to impute nefarious motivations to the other.
This of course means working across differences (though also shared concerns). As
is clear in the debates around social capital, some authors view politics as ultimately
confrontational while others believe there is room for synergy and coproduction
across institutional and political differences and that trust and bridges can be
built. The quality of future enquiry and theorizing will depend very much on
whether such bridges across differences can be built. With or without the concept,
theorizing, in the absence of such social capital among scholars, will be the weaker.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rob Potter, Michael Woolcock, Elizabeth Olson and Sam Hickey for com-
ments on this note. It merits saying that, as I myself am a participant in the debates
discussed here, this is evidently as much a personal read of intellectual debates as it
is a ‘progress report’.

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