Social capital and informal social networks in a changing natural and institutional environment
Final Report Abstract
Social capital has gained much attention in rural development research. Yet, social capital in the form of social networks is a largely missing dimension in income and poverty analysis. Moreover, most research on social capital assumes that it is a uniform source. The effects of different forms of social capital on household outcome are rarely investigated. The objective of this research project, entitled “Social capital and informal social networks in a changing natural and institutional environment” is therefore to broaden our understanding of social capital and networks in rural household economies of developing and transition countries. The discussion of differences and similarities in the household endowment with social capital in the two country comparison (Vietnam/Thailand) contributes to a more distinct knowledge of the role of social capital in rural development. The hypotheses of this research are: Different forms of social capital have distinct effects on a household’s potential of accessing scarce resources and thus household welfare. The standard criticism leveled at the social capital concept is that it is usually defined too broadly and is thus analytically useless. We therefore define social capital more narrowly and leanly as interpersonal networks (ties) plus resources. In this definition, it is the resource that turns the social structure into social capital. In the context of agricultural economics, the data collection approach adopted is an innovative one borrowed from the field of sociology. A ‘personal network survey’ is carried out to measure the individual social capital of rural households. In our analyses we distinguish between three different forms of social capital: bonding, bridging, and linking. Using cluster analysis, four different variables have been created: 1. bonding, 2. bridging, 3. bondinglink, and 4. bridginglink. These variables have then been used as explanatory variables in various multiple regression models to measure the impact of social capital on various household outcomes and its influence on access to resources. Interestingly, depending on the type of social capital the outcome variables are not influenced at all or influenced positively, but they may also be influenced negatively. This implies nonnaïve propagation. The moist surprising result is that bonding social capital, when significant, always had a positive influence on the outcome variables. This is surprising as most literature suggested the opposite following the argument of ‘the strength of weak ties’. But bridging and inking social capital are less often significant and have a mostly negative influence. The prominence of bonding social capital in the rural Southeast Asian context could, on the one hand, mean that the information society has not yet reached those areas and thus the information gathering attribute of bridging and linking social capital is not that important. On the other hand, it could also be that in an Asian context bonding social capital has similar attributes as the other two forms of social capital.
