Last week, I had the chance to attend a talk by one of the few political scientists who have managed to jump over the boundaries of their academic field into broader debates among the public and practitioners.  Harvard’s Robert Putnam was in Trento to speak at the enormous Festival of Economics; as your intrepid Think 3 reporter on the scene, I went to hear what he had to say.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Putnam is best known for the concept of social capital—the idea, as he summed it up, that “social networks have value”.  Just as physical capital (such as buildings, roads and cash), and human capital (skills and knowledge, for example) contribute to our individual and collective wealth, so too do the connections between and within communities.  Those connections between people of the same identity group are examples of “bonding” capital, whereas the connections between people of different ethic or identity groups are often referred to as “bridging” capital.  Living in Italy, for example, I can see that bonding capital is particularly strong here:  people from the same region or town will go out of their way for each other.  When I’m in the UK, on the other hand, I’m struck by the strength of the bridging capital—people might not know their neighbours, but have a lot of friends from different ethnic groups. 

The wealth created by social capital helps societies economically, but also takes a surprising number of other, less visible forms:  according to Putnam, the more people know their neighbours’ first names, the lower their community’s crime rate.  Social isolation can be as bad for your health as smoking, say some studies.  Putnam quoted the notoriously ill-spoken American baseball player Yogi Berra, who once blurted out “Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.”  In other words, in societies with strong social capital, what goes around eventually comes around. 

Not everything that Putnam had to say was optimistic.  A large study he carried out several years ago seemed to hold bad news for ethnically diverse societies.  Apparently, the more diverse a place is, the less people trust members of other races, their neighbours, and even people of the same race.  Innovation and creativity increase with diversity and immigration, but so, it seems, does TV watching and protect marches.  Both bridging and bonding capital plummet. 

Oh dear.  Luckily, the talk didn’t end there.  The crux of the speaker’s argument was that ethnic divisions—race, religion, ethnicity—was not a biological factor but instead socially constructed.  Two generations ago, for example, white Americans very rarely married outside of their religious denomination, whereas now they do.  Italian-Americans were seen as fundamentally different from Irish-Americans; now they’re not.  “If we can construct race, we can deconstruct it and reconstruct it”, according to Putnam.  “Relax!” he told the Italian audience, “my own country has been successfully adjusting to new waves of migrants for centuries—you’ll manage to do it too”. 

Symbolism is crucially important here:  Putnam once, (rather cheekily) apparently told the British royal family that the best way to strengthen their country’s social capital would be to find one of the princes a nice Pakistani bride!  Unsurprisingly, the suggestion apparently went down like a lead balloon, but makes a lot of sense when you think about it—that’s what Europeans have been doing for centuries to construct new national identities. 

It’s easy to see many of the implications of Putnam’s theory for development; indeed, social capital has been incorporated into aid programmes around the world.  The World Bank has a Social Capital Implementation Framework.  Everything from microfinance schemes in Cambodia, the caste system in India, and livestock management in Ethiopia benefit from analysis through this lens.  The idea that trust, cooperation and other forms of social cohesion are essential ingredients of development might not be all that revolutionary.  It provides a useful conceptual tool, however, for development programmes that several decades ago focused mainly on institutions, physical assets and other tangible expressions of development, thereby neglecting equally important—but less visible—expressions of welfare. 

Despite my overall appreciation for the concept, and for Putnam’s presentation, I had a few questions I would have liked to ask him: 

• Does the social breakdown he so reluctantly links with diversity and immigration not perhaps stem from urbanisation?   After all, the two often coincide.  Was he able to control for this external factor?

• The reason Irish- and Italian-Americans no longer see each other as belonging to different ethnic groups is because they’ve grown to adopt similar cultural values over time…and perhaps because their values were never that different to begin with.  How much cultural assimilation—and cultural common ground—is needed for bridging social capital to do its work?  Is social capital consistent with multiculturalism?

• The US and a handful of other countries might be very good at turning diversity to their advantage.  But does a country need certain political institutions—a minimum level of tolerance, rule of law and minority protection—before it is able to create social capital between very different groups of people?  Or perhaps it needs a certain minimum level of wealth, so that resources—and intergroup competition—are not so scarce?  The situation in my home country, South Africa, certainly seems to suggest as much.

I wasn’t able to put these to Putnam, so I thought I’d throw them out to my fellow Thinkers.  I’m actually surprised social capital hasn’t been covered yet in this forum…do people see it as an empty concept that hasn’t made a real difference in development programmes despite its popularity among donors?  How can we better incorporate it into efforts to meet the MDGs? 

I definitely feel the concept has value, though – what do you think?

Photo credit (preview): cc / flickr -by Jeff Bauche._.·´¯)