Microenterprise and social capital: a framework for theory, research, and policy.

1. Introduction

One of the most intriguing aspects of recent welfare reform debates has been the explosion of interest in--and bipartisan endorsement of-microenterprise programs as both an effective and efficient approach to reducing poverty. In the wake of successful efforts to transplant to the United States the experiences of large, high-profile organizations in South Asia and Latin America, 'helping the poor to help themselves' through the extension of credit to underwrite small business ventures has moved from popular slogan to concrete poverty alleviation strategy. The Microcredit Summit has helped focus and publicize these efforts, while setting ambitious global targets for the coming years.

A key feature of microenterprise programs is their use of social relationships as an alternative source of collateral. The poor are typically denied loans from standard commercial sources because they lack adequate surety, and because the size of the loans they require have such high relative costs. From a banker's perspective, in short, lending to the poor is a high-risk venture. One way in which microenterprise programs endeavor to circumvent these problems is by lending not to individuals, but to groups, thereby dispersing risks and lowering costs by devolving to borrowers' social relationships--or "social capital"--tasks that are ordinarily performed by material or monetary assets. The social capital of the poor thus acts as a substitute for what they lack by way of physical or financial capital.

This approach to providing financial services in poor communities has a rich history in the economic anthropology literature, which has long been fascinated by rotating savings and credit associations (RoSCAs), tontines, ethnic savings clubs, etc. Indeed, much of the early empirical validation of the concept of social capital drew on this literature, citing indigenous credit delivery mechanisms in particular communities as proof positive of its existence and importance. Microenterprise programs add an additional dimension to these cases, however, because while they draw on similar social mechanisms among borrowers, these mechanisms have not emerged "spontaneously." Rather, they have been initiated and coordinated by "outsiders," namely the staff of professional development agencies or NGOs. Moreover, as sociologists have long been aware, diffuse personal ties are not only to be found in informally organized communities or neighborhoods; they are also critical to the construction and performance of formal organizations. Microenterprise programs are thus an enormously fruitful arena for the study of social capital, precisely because they provide a common setting in which to analyze both its community-level and institutional dimensions. Lessons learned from studying social capital in microenterprise programs can, in turn, help to provide a more general framework for improving efforts to address poverty through institutional interventions and public policy.

To this end, the purpose of this paper is to outline a social capital framework that is useful in terms of identifying some of the key institutional issues facing practitioners and policymakers in the field of microenterprise. This framework is derived from a comprehensive synthesis and review of the social capital literature as it pertains to economic development, and my own fieldwork-based research on microenterprise organizations in India and Bangladesh. [1]

2. The evolution of research on social capital and economic development

Social capital has a long intellectual history in the social sciences. As best we can determine, the first explicit (albeit isolated) usage of social capital in the contemporary sense is that of Lyda J. Hanifan (1916), who employed the term, anticipating James Coleman, to explain the role of community participation in shaping local educational outcomes. [2] Social capital as a concept then disappeared for half a century, but was "reinvented" by Jane Jacobs in the late 1960s and subsequently elaborated upon by Glenn Loury in the late 1970s and then Coleman in the 1980s. (A complementary approach was also being developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, though Anglo-American scholars did not become fully aware of this until the late 1980s.) The major impetus to scholarship on the topic, however, came with Robert Putnam's seminal work in the 1990s on governance in Italy, [3] and his subsequent provocative thesis that Americans in the late twentieth century were "bowling alone," i.e. becoming increasingly disengaged from active participation in public life, a trend with disconcerting implications for participatory democracy. [4]