Title:	Harnessing and Guiding Social Capital for Rural Development
Authors:	Shahrukh Rafi Khan, Zeb Rifaqat, Sajid Kazmi
Keywords:	Rural development
Issue Date:	2007
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	The Human Development Foundation North America (HDFNA) founded the Human Development Foundation (HDF) as a Pakistani development NGO to execute its Pakistan Project in rural Pakistan in 1998 and contracted the authors as research members of a Pakistani think tank based in Islamabad, Pakistan, to document the process of program implementation. The exciting part of this research was the complete freedom to design it and also to study the work of a rural development NGO from the very inception of the project. Collective action via participatory development was the logical conceptual framework for the research. However, we felt that this really did not go to the heart of why collective action takes place and what rural development NGOs contribute to this process? The rapidly growing literature on social capital provided a possible answer to this question. Rural development NGOs claim to create social capital in the form of village organizations (VOs) or community organizations (COs) that subsequently catalyze the collective action. Based on our understanding of the literature, we hypothesized that social capital in this context is a feature of the community in terms of their norms, mutual trust, reciprocal obligations, and networks so that, if successful, development organizations (DOs) can harness the social capital and embody it in VOs or COs and guide these organizations to participate and engage in collective action for poverty alleviation and community welfare. Of course, other factors could also result in successful collective action, and although collective action could be induced, it could also occur independent of the DOs. We explore this issue using an in-depth case study. We think the documentation we engaged in is valuable, particularly because of the varied research method we employed, including placing an anthropologist in the field for a year, utilizing control villages for comparison, and adding two field-based updates. We also discovered and documented the importance of understanding history and culture for the process of harnessing social capital. We turn again to the inception of this book and return to research issues later in the preface.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/57427
ISBN:	978-0-230-60972-3
Appears in Collections:	Rural Development Studies

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