The Fountain of Social Capital: Love of the Creator and Oneness of Humanity

The concept of social capital is multidisciplinary and not easily understood. It has been used to explain phenomena from the growth tragedy in Africa associated with high ethnic fragmentation (Easterly and Levine, 1997), group-based programs for environmental improvements including microfinance (Pretty and Ward, 2001) to the role of trust in underdevelopment (Banfield, 1958; Guiso et al., 2004) and the limited stock market participation puzzle (Guiso et al., 2008). Since the 1990s, social capital has received considerable attention among philosophers, sociologists, economists, and political scientists. Among the reasons attributed to the proliferation of the social capital literature lies in the “limits of the ‘standard’ approaches to the problems of economic development and political order” (Ostrom and Ahn, 2009, p. 17). Standard approaches are unable to explain economic and political performance across countries as they do not account for “the omitted factors: trust and norms of reciprocity, networks and forms of civic engagement, and both formal and informal institutions” (Ostrom and Ahn, 2009, p. 18). In terms of policy development, countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada have considered the impact of policy on a community’s social capital. The World Bank has developed a Social Capital Implementation Framework, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has included social capital in developing its policy on well-being. These efforts signal the importance with which social capital is accorded particularly by policy and development practitioners (Illingworth, 2012).