Social Capital and Natural Resource Management: A Critical Perspective

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Social Capital and Natural Resource Management: A Critical Perspective Jérôme Ballet, Nicolas Sirven and Mélanie Requiers-Desjardins The Journal of Environment Development 2007; 16; 355 DOI: 10.1177/1070496507310740 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jed.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/4/355

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Articles

Social Capital and Natural Resource Management

The Journal of Environment & Development Volume 16 Number 4 December 2007 355-374 © 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/1070496507310740 http://jed.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

A Critical Perspective Jérôme Ballet University of Versailles Saint Quentin

Nicolas Sirven University of Cambridge

Mélanie Requiers-Desjardins Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel à Tunis

This article explores the reasons why community-based natural resource management is not necessarily a panacea. One reason may be that the communitarian benefits associated with social capital formation generally focus on the structural approach (e.g., network connections, group size) and too rarely take into consideration the underlying cultural context in which these relationships are embedded. Using Bourdieu’s seminal framework for the different forms of capital (social, cultural, and symbolic), it indeed appears that (a) social capital is costly to produce and (b) its outcomes on resource management depend highly on the cultural capital (values, norms, etc.) in which it exists. The reference to Bourdieu’s social capital helps to introduce the analysis of power relationships in community-based natural resource management. Keywords: social capital; natural resource management

1. Introduction The concept of sustainable development (SD) emerged in the 1980s (Clark & Munn, 1986; World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987) as “a good deal of attention on social and economic conditions in developing countries, and their connection to environmental degradation, [led to] a curious combination of radical and reformist elements” (Robinson, 2004, p. 372). Similar to many other policies related to environmental preoccupations, community-based resource management policies in developing countries have since then been influenced by the debates between conservationists and preservationists.1 According to Western and Wright (1994), “community-based conservation includes natural resources or biodiversity protection by, for, and with the local community” (p. 7). Berkes (2006) extends the definition so that “community-based conservation includes natural resources or 355 Downloaded from http://jed.sagepub.com at NANYANG TECHNOL UNIV on January 19, 2010

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biodiversity protection by, for, and with the local community, taking into account drivers, institutional linkages at the local level, and multiple levels of organization that impact and shape institutions at the local level” (p. 3).2 Community-based natural resource management has thus emerged and developed as a third way between government administration and market-oriented management (Baland & Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990). The former mechanism is often criticized because of its inability to control local people’s actions on the environment. For instance, a formal unauthorized access to a forest area may be nonprotective if the government does not supply effective control and coercion means. The latter device––focusing on property rights––is as well denounced in the literature as ineffective in a lot of situations. The control of access to resources is in effect quite costly in the private management of natural resources such as seas or pastoral lands (Platteau, 2003). Moreover, market-based management tends to produce social costs through inequity and exclusion of deprived populations and often leads to market failures such as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) and unsustainable natural resource management. The lack of efficiency of traditional approaches (the state vs. the market) has been handled as an important policy concern for environmental sustainability since the 1992 World Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. One of the most influential ideas that have been suggested deals with the involvement of stakeholders in natural resource management. In theory, “participative governance” means that the civil society (nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], local associations, etc.) joins with governments and industrial lobbies in a common decisional pattern to achieve agreements between the three parties. In practice, it supposes that development projects are conditional on civil society participation via the creation of local infrastructures, the employment of local populations, and so on. Participatory governance follows from the subsidiary principle (Mors, 1993) that seeks to achieve the hierarchical optimal level of policy implementation. Local communities––as part of the civil society––are increasingly pointed up in the literature as the most efficient bottom organizations to minimize social costs and maximize social welfare.3 From a conceptual point of view, this community-oriented approach corroborated the emergence of the social capital literature in the mid-1990s. Though “social capital means different things to different people” (Dasgupta & Serageldin, 1999, p. x), it is broadly accepted that this concept refers to “the features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions” (Putnam, 1993, p. 167). The increasing popularity4 of social capital and its relative accuracy to instantly address complex issues––both theoretical and political––resulted in it being regarded as a made-to-measure terminology for the analysis of common resource management and governance (e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 2002; Isham, 2002; Ostrom, 1999; Pretty, 2003; Pretty & Ward, 2001). The assumed––and to some extent, well-documented––efficiency of social capital in devolution programs based on participatory governance and collective

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actions of local populations have made social capital a cornerstone for SD policies: “Clearly, international agencies, governments, banks and NGOs must invest in social and human capital creation” (Pretty & Ward, 2001, p. 220). Nevertheless, the previous idealistic vision of social capital as a panacea for common resource management has been widely challenged. Social capital is in effect very contextual and may thus have different outcomes in different places. Coleman’s (1988) prior study stressed that these contextual shifts in the nature of social capital may lead to harmful situations.5 Several approaches in economics associate social capital with counterproductive effects on development. For instance, Rubio (1997) calls “perverse social capital” the criminal organizations that promote opportunistic behaviors and lead to inefficient situations. Actually, many influential authors have acknowledged “the downside” (Portes & Landholt, 1996) or the “dark side” (Ostrom, 1999) of social capital. Although these criticisms incite us to balance the economic payoff of social capital, the literature seems to focus its attention on the analysis of the symptoms only, remaining somehow silent on the potential causes of “bad” social capital. Our purpose here is to shed more light on some mechanisms of the downside of social capital, with special emphasis on community resource governance. Following Berkes (2004), we do not argue about whether community-based management is efficient or not; we rather focus on the conditions under which it is efficient or not. This article proposes to analyze the mechanisms of community-based resource management with special attention to actors and institutions within the community—as suggested by Agrawal and Gibson (1999).6 Drawing on Bourdieu’s prior analysis, we argue that the cultural aspects of social capital are the key to understanding the contextual specificities of harmful social interactions. The article is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the main arguments in favor of social capital as a key concept for common resource analysis. Section 3 shows how the mainstream definition of social capital explicitly encompasses cultural features of communities and therefore tends to highlight Bourdieu’s analysis. This leads us to acknowledge that there are no homogeneous stocks of social capital between communities because of cultural differences. Section 4 focuses on some negative consequences of cultural specificities in community social capital. It is argued that social capital may increase transaction costs and may result in dangerous social situations, such as conflicts. Conclusions are drawn in Section 5.

2. From Community Governance to Social Capital 2.1. Communities as Efficient Social Organizations The cold war rhetoric focusing on market- versus state-oriented policies did not indeed lend much attention to in-between strategies. Meanwhile, many field-based

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studies were nonetheless carried out in developing countries (for instance and among others, Cernea, 1987; de los Reyes & Jopillo, 1986; Pretty, Thomson, & Kiara, 1995; Röling & Wagemakers, 1997; Uphoff, 1992; Wade, 1988), which provided the future background for an innovative theory of collective action. Ostrom’s (1990) seminal book Governing the Commons thus proposed an approach to communities as particular social organizations able to address certain problems that cannot be handled either by individuals acting alone or by markets and governments. Agrawal (2002) generated from this book and other sources a set of critical enabling conditions for commons sustainability (see also Holling, 1978; Roseland, 1992; Walters, 1986). The literature not only displays many examples of successful natural resource management carried out without the state’s intervention but also frequently emphasizes that the government’s actions may be harmful if they are disconnected from local institutions (Pretty & Ward, 2001). For instance, the substitution of communities’ traditional governance for modern structures set up by the government contributed to rapid deforestation in Nepal (e.g., Agrawal, 1999; Agrawal & Ostrom, 1999; Gilmour & Fisher, 1991; Ives & Messerli, 1989; Waltner-Toews, Kay, Neudoerffer, & Gitau, 2003). The fact that different agents––with divergent intentions––share the same natural resources explains why common resource management often leads to unstable consensus and free-rider behaviors that hinder sustainable efficient outcomes (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994). Common resources are indeed vulnerable to overexploitation because (a) the users’ access to (or exclusion from) these resources is difficult to control and (b) each user is capable of subtracting from the welfare of all others. These two features of common resources are respectively referred to in the literature as the exclusion problem and the subtractability problem (Berkes, 1996; Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom, Burger, Field, Norgaard, & Policansky, 1999). From this standpoint, local communities pose as dedicated social organizations capable of overcoming this problem insofar as they institute social norms that inhibit outstanding behaviors. The relatively small scale of the community and its cultural homogeneity make it impossible for anyone to be anonymous (e.g., reputation, social status). In that sense, the social group may implement some social control over its members. In a given context with a delimited objective, communities thus impose significant costs on deviant behaviors, such as social disapproval, shame, and group exclusion (Ollagon, 1991). As a result, social norms reduce transaction costs and opportunistic behaviors, and they guarantee the enforcement of collective actions. Bowles and Gintis (2002) summarized the efficiency mechanisms of communities in the following terms: Communities can sometimes do what governments and markets fail to do because their members, but not outsiders, have crucial information about other members’ behaviors, capacities, and needs. Members use this information both to uphold norms . . . and to make use of efficient insurance arrangements that are not plagued by the usual problems of moral hazard and adverse selection. (p. F421)

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We may say that what is called “information” here has been analyzed as interpersonal trust among the members of the same community. If we go by the definition of a community as a coalition of individuals where social interactions among them are frequent and/or strongly emotional (i.e., culturally homogeneous), the information about members’ behavior is then redundant within the community (Burt, 1992; Krackhardt, 1992). As a consequence, each individual can get an idea of some other member’s behavior (Gambetta, 1987). Mutual trust thus arises within a social group when a high level of subjective probability is associated with most individuals of the community––we may call it the social reputation assigned to each member. Note that a high level of mutual trust incites community members to follow the rules of the community (i.e., social norms) because everyone anticipates that the others will do the same. Governance costs are consequently lowered (Platteau, 2003). Because generalized trust is accumulative–– the stronger social bonds are (e.g., very frequent social interactions), the more accurately subjective probability is formulated––social scientists have brought the reference to capital into play to address this issue, namely social capital.

2.2. Focus on Social Capital Although the concept of social capital has previously been developed by social scientists like Pierre Bourdieu (1980, 1986) and James Coleman (1988), it is widely acknowledged that Robert Putnam is undeniably the author who introduced this concept into economic literature. Putnam’s work draws on Coleman’s (1988) definition of social capital devoted to some aspects of social structures (e.g., norms, social obligations, information channels) that facilitate certain actions of actors within the structure. Since Coleman emphasized that “an especially important form of social capital is the norm that one should forgo self-interest and act in the interest of the collectivity” (p. 104), social capital is seen as the institutional solution communities develop to solve the free-rider problem and thus make collective action possible. This idea makes social capital play the role of a key institutional mechanism that is supposed to enhance the capacity of resource users to govern field-based development programs (e.g., watershed programs, in-shore fisheries, mountain commons, grazing areas, forest resources). In a theoretical perspective, Putnam’s work follows from a neo-institutional approach that seeks to explain how and why some “good” institutions (North, 1990) make possible the achievement of certain goals that would have been reached neither by individuals acting alone nor by markets and governments. Social capital is thus regarded as “the missing link” (Grootaert, 1997) for economic analysis and public policies. Ostrom (1990) argues that setting up institutions, social control mechanisms, and rules to allocate benefits and costs of collective action within a given community can be analyzed as a creation of social capital by self-organized resource governance systems. In this perspective, “social capital is the shared knowledge, understandings,

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norms, rules, and expectations about patterns of interactions that groups of individuals bring to a recurrent activity” (Ostrom, 1999, p. 176). At this stage, we should acknowledge that the concept of social capital applied to community management resources encompasses cultural aspects (how individuals bargain over rules) as well as structural ones (network relationships). Note that this multifaceted perspective of the concept is well acknowledged in the social capital literature. To synthesize the different studies on social capital,7 Krishna and Uphoff (1999) found it useful to dichotomize Putnam’s concept into two dimensions, accounting for structural and cultural (or cognitive) forms of social relationships. Structural social capital is understood as the various social organizations making up society, such as families, social networks, voluntary associations, and so on. Cultural social capital refers to shared norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs: These two forms of social capital are interactive and mutually reinforcing, but they are distinguishable from one another in the following ways. . . . The first form of social capital is external in that it can be observed and can be modified directly, while the second is internal, residing within people’s heads, not easily changed. (Krishna & Uphoff, 1999, p. 7)

This distinction is of crucial interest for the analysis of the interactions between the different components of social capital. For instance, it may help to open the “black box” of social capital by providing a better understanding of the underlying social mechanisms of the creation and use of social capital (Durlauf & Fafchamps, 2003). Unfortunately, Krishna and Uphoff (1999) did not pay much attention to this point, though they acknowledge there must be some interactions between cultural and structural forms of social capital. Investigations are thus needed on the relationships between the cultural and structural aspect of social capital.

3. Social Capital, Culture, and Power 3.1. Bringing Bourdieu Back In Although the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was not the first one to use the term social capital,8 he is certainly the originator of the concept in that he provided a coherent theoretical framework of social interactions and their economic and social outcomes (e.g., Bourdieu, 1979, 1980, 1986). Bourdieu identifies three dimensions of capital, each with its own relationship with class: economic, cultural, and social capital. Bourdieu’s use of economic analogies has often been the subject of a dual criticism: On one hand, it reveals an “economistic” vision of social reality, which is perhaps too much inspired by neoclassical economics (cf., Gary Becker’s work); on the other hand, it appears like a kind of mechanical metaphor transposed to cultural phenomena in a determinist way, as in the Marxist tradition. Nevertheless, Lebaron (2003) suggests that a third analysis of Bourdieu’s economic analogies is possible.

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He thus focuses on two central aspects that critics often forget: first, the close but very particular link between Bourdieu’s work and economics as a growing scientific discipline during the 1958 to 1966 period––when Bourdieu developed his concepts, and second, the criticisms Bourdieu makes of the economic model as a general scientific tool for the social sciences. This “double” position opens up the possibility of an integrated vision of social and economic factors of practices in common resource management, especially through the introduction of the social, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital. This is also a way to (re)introduce the analysis of social powers in economic theory (Szreter, 2002). Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition––or in other words, to membership in a group. . . . Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e. , in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee. (Bourdieu, 1986, pp. 244-249)

Social capital is thus a set of resources for individuals in a social context, whereas cultural capital somehow refers to the cultural context made up of norms, values, shared beliefs, and so on. The reference to Bourdieu’s (1980, 1986) definition of social and cultural capital is interesting insofar as it does not only perfectly embody the structural and cultural aspects of Krishna and Uphoff’s (1999) mainstream approach to social capital, but it also links them together. Cultural features among homogeneous social groups (common norms of behavior, shared values, etc.) should be taken into account as they have to be transformed into “symbolic” features to be assimilated by the members of the group (cognition) and attributed among them and to each other (recognition). In other words, the mutual cognition–recognition condition makes social capital take on a symbolic character. The combination of cultural and social capital thus helps to convert these forms of capital into symbolic capital: Symbolic capital . . . is nothing other than capital, in whatever form, when perceived by an agent endowed with categories of perception arising from the internalization (embodiment) of the structure of its distribution, i.e. when it is known and recognized as self-evident. (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 204)

3.2. Heterogeneous Forms of Social Capital In a common resource management perspective, the previous analysis implies that community social capital remains a potential resource until its ownership is

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legitimized through the mediation of symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1979, 1986). Indeed, the community network of persons needs to be “activated”––that is, individuals have to behave in a purposeful way, with a common interest––so that a collective action is carried out. According to Newman and Dale (2007), “this ability to turn social capital into action can be described as a group’s agency” (p. 81). Krishna (2001) stresses, in a study of rural development in India, that social capital is not a sufficient resource and should be activated through agency of the local population. For instance, villages where the level of social capital is low can perform efficiently if the level of agency is high. Moreover, Krishna indicates that there is no correlation between the level of social capital and the level of agency. Norms and beliefs figure in the analysis of social capital not only because they function as sources of social capital, but also because the norms and beliefs in the surrounding environment influence the value of a given stock of social capital. (Adler & Kwon, 2002, p. 33)

Siisiäinen (2000) argues that social capital as trust (the Putnamian concept) can be understood as the recognition of social capital within the community (the Bourdieusian concept). Put differently, trust among members of the same social group that enables collective action can be analyzed as the effective mobilization of social capital through the mediation of symbolic power. Because this activation of social capital can only be achieved through the mediation of symbolic capital, the key issue here deals with the contingent characteristic of symbolic capital. Because symbolic capital exists and grows only in intersubjective reflection and can only be recognized within that framework, it hence defines what forms and uses of capital are acknowledged as legitimate bases of social positions––that is, the distribution of powers––in a given society, community, or whatever social group. Community social capital refers here to a set of interindividual social relationships that are governed by the distribution of this symbolic power among the members. It is noticeable that in most traditional forms of social organization (e.g., chiefferies), this power is obviously not distributed equally among the members of the community. We may thus account for two main consequences for common resource management. First, there may be some tensions between participatory or deliberative and traditional or customary resource management, the former requiring a democratic process with equal rights, which the latter does not usually provide because of cultural and power structures. Stern (2005) suggests that the core idea behind deliberative processes is that democracy generates several centers of power, the problem being that although some deep-rooted traditions of democracy exist through a customary system of deliberation in some developing countries, customary decision processes are often based on a hierarchy of powers in many other developing countries. Bardhan (1993) underlines that

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in many local communities some rudimentary forms of cooperation have been sustained and enforced over the years by traditional authority structures. While there may have been some bit of a sharing ethic, the predominant social norm was often that of an unequal patron-client system, in which the powerful who might enjoy disproportionate benefits from the institution of cooperation enforced the rules of the game and gave leadership to solidaristic efforts. (p. 638)

Second, as a relational resource, social capital is contingent on the nature (structural and cultural) of the social bond among members of the same community. Furthermore, it follows from cultural features of the community (norms, values, etc.) that the distribution of power among the members is contingent as well. That is to say, each community has its own sociocultural procedure (the nature and use of symbolic capital) to transform potential social relationships into effective resources for collective action. Communities with a comparable level of social capital may thus not have the same effective use of this resource because of the various distributions of power between social groups. As a consequence, social capital should––at least––be considered as something heterogeneous between communities.

3.3 From Group Heterogeneity to Power Heterogeneity Heterogeneity within groups or local communities has already been described as a key determinant of collective action and natural resources conservation. Baland and Platteau (1996) account for three main forms of heterogeneity: cultural differences, individual incentives, and differential endowments. There is general agreement in the literature about the capability of the first two forms to hinder collective action. Cultural differences may thus lead to some misunderstandings in interpreting the “rules of the game,” and individual incentives may introduce some divergences in the pursuit of collective goals. Note that these two counterproductive aspects of group heterogeneity can be combined. For example, Basset (1993) shows this combination in the case of conflicts between Senufo peasants and Fulani herders in Côte d’Ivoire. Arguments about the influence of economic heterogeneity on collective action are much less unanimous. On one hand, differential endowments seem to foster collective action––as far as wealthier individuals’ incentives coincide with common goals. This is due to the fact that this subpopulation is often in a position to assume leadership responsibility for collective actions. Kanbur (1992) thus points out that endowment inequalities are not necessarily inconsistent with equity in cooperation earnings. This does not mean that everyone makes the same profit, but at least everyone has the incentive to cooperate. Baland and Platteau (1996) illustrate this idea using Jodha’s (1985) study on commons management in semi-arid areas in India, and Quiggin’s (1993) analysis of rice culture areas in Sri Lanka. In the same way, Swallow and Bromley (1995) indicate that the setting up of crop rotation in some villages in Lesotho was successful

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because it was mainly beneficial to village chiefs. According to Brockington (2002), this argument—also used by Peters (1994) for Botswana, by Menzies (1994) for forest management in China, and by Gaspart and Platteau (2007) for fisheries in Senegal—helped several conservationists spread the idea that poor people should be excluded from preservation resource areas. On the other hand, the positive effect of differential endowments is disputed by many scholars. Economic inequalities are mainly thought to hinder collective action because they weaken trust among individuals (Seabright, 1993), and they induce inequalities in decisional power (Neupane, 2003). Furthermore, Agrawal (1993) and Mukhopadhyay (2004) argue that economic inequalities encourage the richer ones to act individually, as they can compensate for the loss of nonparticipation in collective action through the consumption of private goods. Conversely, the wealthier part of the population’s incentive to participate in collective actions may lead to underparticipation of poor people (Baland & Platteau, 1999; Bardhan, Ghatak, & Karaivanov, 2007). On the whole, features of power relationships seem to be both explicit and implicit determinants of people’s ability to cooperate, and as a consequence, they do challenge the assumption of a positive aspect of economic heterogeneity on collective action. Boyce (2007) argues that power—with its many faces—is a fundamental issue in natural resource management. Bourdieu’s work is therefore very interesting here insofar as it provides a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital—the latter form of capital being the key to converting any other form of capital into another. As a consequence, differences in economic capital endowment may lead to differences in power (social and cultural capital) through the mediating role of symbolic capital. Andersson and Agrawal (2006) thus underline that local institutional arrangements pass the influence of economic, social, and political inequalities on to natural resource management: In others words, the influence of socioeconomic inequalities or equity on the environment depends on the nature and effectiveness of local governance institutions and how these filter—by dampening, enhancing, or refracting—the effects of socioeconomic factors related to equity” (p. 9).

From this standpoint, the specificity of any local institutional arrangement is mainly due to particular distributions of power that social and cultural capital endowments generate. Fauroux (2003) shows in the context of rural Madagascar that power relationships relying on complex and heterogeneous social structures bring about a multiplicity of power struggles that affect the management of forests, commons, and irrigation. Bourdieu’s analysis of the influence social capital has on other forms of capital is thus especially useful to highlight the downside of this concept.

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4. On Some Negative Consequences of Social Capital 4.1. Social Capital Is Costly One of the most striking arguments in favor of common resource management lies in that social capital guarantees social cohesion and improves trust among members of the community, so it helps to reduce transaction costs (Isham, 2002). Although this assumption has already been tested and validated in most empirical studies (Ostrom, 1990), we believe that such an approach to social capital is only partial because it does not pay attention to the costs raised by social capital accumulation. Building social capital indeed requires considerable investment in both establishing and maintaining useful relationships. The first kind of “expenditure” is well illustrated with Bourdieu’s (1986) statement: The network of relationships is the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term, i.e., at transforming contingent relations . . . into relationships that are at once necessary and elective, implying durable obligations subjectively felt (feelings of gratitude, respect, friendship, etc.) or institutionally guaranteed (rights). (pp. 249-250; see also Adler & Kwon, 2002; Evans, 1996; Sabel, 1993)

In addition, maintaining social capital is also necessary, as the embeddedness of this resource in social relationships makes it depreciate with nonuse: “Social bonds have to be periodically renewed and reconfirmed or else they lose efficacy” (Adler & Kwon, 2002, p. 22). The field-based literature on social capital provides a lot of examples of costly expenditures aimed at building and maintaining social relationships. The example of habbanae in rural Cameroon illustrates the above idea and helps one understand the reasons for such expenditures. The habbanae is the loan of an animal (e.g., a heifer) from a herdsman to another. The receiver keeps the animal for a given period of time throughout which he can hold it in usufruct (e.g., a heifer’s milk and calves). Afterward, the animal is returned to the provider, who may then enjoy a new habbanae in return (Bonfiglioli, 1988, Dupire, 1996). This system of gift giving––based on habbanae as a common norm of reciprocity––is a device for herdsmen to build and maintain social relationships and, incidentally, to protect themselves from exposure to natural disasters (dryness, epizootics, etc.) by dispersing part of their herds and asking members of their network for help in the event of need. From this standpoint, it seems that social capital is rather about a costly form of organization than about an inexpensive predetermined feature of a community. As a consequence, the question of the positive outcomes of social capital should be addressed in terms of its net effects instead of the usual gross focus on positive externalities. Using a capital-like terminology, it seems important to pay attention to the

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profitability of social capital. Where the accountable assessment seems a difficult task—though conceivable using a cost–benefit analysis—the theoretical implications are much easier to draw: If social capital needs any kind of investment that can be analyzed as costly for the community, then it is to be anticipated that the returns on investment are not necessarily higher than the initial expenditures. This proposal is even truer when the gross outcomes of social capital are injurious to the community.

4.2. Social Capital Is Hazardous The literature on common resource management often emphasizes that the efficiency of social capital resides in the norm of reciprocity. This norm is actually assumed to foster interpersonal trust and thus strengthen social bonds between members of the community. To test this assumption empirically, Daniere and Takahashi (1999) carried out a study aimed at identifying the values that underpin community participation behaviors in Thailand. In some way, they concur in the initial proposition insofar as they show that the rejection of the value of individualism9 is associated with the increased likelihood of participation in community activities. However, they also go along with a growing part of the literature that stresses that all gift-giving relationships may not always promote successful achievement of community resource management. More precisely, Buenavista’s (1998) study based on patron–client relationships10 in the Philippines suggests that some fishing practices based on this value led to environmentally unsustainable situations. Dynamite fishing is indeed widely practiced––though illegal––as a result of the fact that generous patrons (dynamite fishermen) and clients have evolved in a gift-giving culture. In addition, Daniere and Takahashi (1999) have established that individuals who exhibit no or little support to the notion of patron–client relationships are substantially more likely to participate in community activities. As they put it, relationships among people in Thailand have traditionally been based on reciprocal bonds or obligations that assume that the patron will undertake to support and assist his or her “clients” in return for their loyalty and effort. As such, individuals who reject the importance or the underlying rationale of patron-client linkages might also be individuals who are less traditional or conservative in their belief systems, perhaps more educated, and more likely to question existing modes of behavior. It is reasonable . . . to find that an untraditional individual in terms of beliefs would also be more likely to participate in community action, [which is] a nontraditional behavior. (Daniere & Takahashi, 1999, p. 549)

This shows that the positive or negative outcomes of one norm of reciprocity depend on from which cultural basis (i.e., values) this norm arises. The patron–client relationship illustrates for instance that traditional values are not necessarily efficient in common resource management. Moreover, the situation can be worse when those traditional norms are ethically embedded. Pantoja (2002) argues that collective

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actions based on ethnic exclusionary activities can encourage “closed-groups” formation and incidentally discourage bridging social capital formation (cf., Woolcock, 1998). Having recourse to past social ties may thus impede the creation of new social relationships (Gargiulo & Benassi, 2000) so that actors are confined to inadequate situations that facilitate undesirable behaviors (Borgatti & Foster, 2003). “In this case, social capital works unconstructively for society because of its exclusionary nature” (Milagrosa & Slangen, 2005). Similarly, Newman and Dale (2005, 2007) highlight the different outcomes different forms of social capital would produce. On one hand, bonding social capital can be an obstacle to innovation because of the fact that renewed information is less accessible and innovation is discouraged. On the other hand, bridging social capital favors renewed information and facilitates normative adaptation to new constraints. As a consequence, bonding social capital would hinder agency, whereas bridging social capital would promote it. One of the dramatic consequences of such a closure in social capital is a possible “scapegoat” attitude toward outsiders when the community faces problems. Samisoa (2001) thus underlines how migrants in Madagascar are often considered as responsible for the destruction of collective resources. Because they share different norms of collective behavior, migrants are regarded as nonrespectful of traditional norms and values that are believed to ensure the protection of the environment. Note that Koffi (2005) provides the same arguments from field-based studies in Côte d’Ivoire, and Laurent, Mathieu, and Totté (1994) witnessed a similar phenomenon in connection with access to land in Burkina Faso. More generally, social capital in multiethnic societies does not always play the role of a “glue” sticking people together but may rather be a source of tensions between other groups (Bates, 1999; Daubon & Saunders, 2002; Pantoja, 1999; Woolcock & Narayan, 2000). Ballet and Hamzetta (2003) find in Mauritania that social capital regularly supports power relationships in the same tribal group and thus benefits the richest at the expense of the poorest. The previous examples are useful in that they point to the difficulty in acknowledging the real problems of community resource management. Environmental degradations are less caused by migrants than by the distribution of power inside communities and the ensuing related conflicts and exclusions. Andriananja’s (2005) study of forest management in Madagascar exemplifies how the power phenomenon inside communities may foster common resource destruction when for instance individuals start forest fires in reprisal for unfavorable decisions (e.g., moral sanction, exclusion) of the community. In a more general perspective, Bowles and Gintis (2002) underline that when insider-outsider distinctions are made on divisive and morally repugnant bases such as race, religion, nationality or sex, community governance may contribute more to fostering parochial narrow-mindedness and ethnic hostility than to addressing the failures of markets and states. This downside of community becomes particularly troubling when insiders are wealthy and powerful and outsiders are exploited as a result. (p. 420)

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5. Conclusion Because many successful examples are provided in the literature, this article does not deny that communities are often efficient social structures for natural resource management––especially when these are added to state-oriented and market-based policies. This article rather stresses that the previous proposal is barely true under certain particular circumstances, and it thus warns that we should not derive any general rule from a potentially narrow perspective. Our approach rests on an analysis of communities made up of culturally embedded social connections. It is an attempt to gain conviction from the widespread idea that communities do not solely exist in their structural form (or social capital, e.g., networks, groups, associations) but also encompass cultural aspects (or cultural capital, e.g., norms, values, trust, cooperative behaviors). This article suggests using Bourdieu’s theory of the conversion of different forms of capital in the analysis of community-based natural resource management. The combination of social and cultural capital therefore helps to understand the underlying power relationships (or symbolic capital) that shape individuals’ interactions in a social structure. Note that because a community is defined by both the cultural context (cultural capital) and the social structural relations that are embedded in it (social capital), the distribution of powers (symbolic capital) tends to be specific to each community. According to Bourdieu, it follows from this perspective that (a) nothing guarantees that the interindividual situations between members of two distinct social structures are the same and (b) the process of building social interactions is costly, as the creation of symbolic capital requires investing in social and/or cultural capital. Put differently, community-based resource management is neither a costless procedure nor a panacea in that a successful resource management in a given context may lead to different outcomes in another sociocultural environment. Bowles and Gintis (2002) thus acknowledged that “like markets and governments, communities also fail” (p. 419). The example of the Mafia in Italy, which was originally a peasant association for development, illustrates the idea that it would be judicious to investigate into the values of any community before empowering its people. Most of the recent community-based development projects do take into account the potentially negative effects that structural power-related forces could have on human capital assets on the community level. For instance, the World Bank proposes training programs available for CSOs (such as the Community Empowerment and Social Inclusion Learning Program, which aims at empowering poor communities and other marginalized groups to drive their own development) and compliance mechanisms (environmental and social safeguard policies, independent forum for private citizens who believe that they or their interests have been, or could be, directly harmed by a project financed by the World Bank) to guarantee the success of community-based projects. Nevertheless, these kinds of mechanisms do not help opening the “black box” of power relationships within communities, as they

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essentially focus on strengthening ties between communities and external stakeholders. It is conceivable that inequalities within the communities may therefore last or even increase (e.g., if training courses are only beneficial to the elite). Put differently, “strengthening stakeholder participation” has become a buzzword that donors want to see embraced but with little attention as to how this can be done without exacerbating existing inequality in access to decision making and natural resources on the local level.

Notes 1. Although the World Conservation Strategy (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources [IUCN], 1980) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (IUCN, 1994) insist on the importance of taking into account local populations’ needs and perspectives, some conservationists have warned against the risk of putting forward social considerations more than biological ones; such a “tragic failure” (Locke & Dearden, 2005) could lead to irreversible damages on protected areas. 2. Note that community-based resource management does not imply that local communities are exclusively in charge of natural areas management. As Berkes (2006) puts it, “community-based conservation can be used as a shorthand level for conservation from the bottom up, or decentralized governance that starts from the ground up but involves a network of interactions at various levels” (p. 2). 3. The current literature on common resource management underlines the fundamental role community involvement plays in the achievement of governmental development programs, such as the delivery of electricity to local populations (Majumdar, 1995), the implementation of public sanitation (Douglas, 1992, 1998; Douglas, Lee, & Kem, 1994), and so on. 4. In the mid-1990s, the term social capital was indeed widely used in the economic literature. For instance, the number of new articles associated with the keyword social capital in the Repec electronic database rose from 10 in 1995 up to 430 in 2001. 5. As Coleman (1988) says, “effective norms in an area can reduce innovativeness” (p. 105). 6. As Agrawal and Gibson (1999) state, those who conceptualize community as shared norms may fail to recognize the difficulties this position poses for conservation. Unlike the factors of community size, composition, and links to a specific territorial space which can all be directly influenced through external intervention, community as shared understandings is probably the least amenable to such manipulation. 7. In 1996, the World Bank launched the Social Capital Initiative with a view to unifying under one single banner most of the heterogeneous works on social capital. 8. Putnam (2000, p. xv) noticed that Hannifan had already used the expression “social capital” in 1913. 9. In the Thai context, individualism means the absence of commitment on the part of individuals to social institutions. 10. Note that the patron–client relationship is a norm of behavior based on the interrelated values of generosity (patron) and loyalty (client).

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Jérôme Ballet is a senior lecturer in economics and researcher at the Center of Ethics and Economics for Environment and Development. He is editor of the review ethics and economics: http://ethiqueeconomique.net.

Nicolas Sirven is a research associate at the Capability & Sustainability Centre (Von Hügel Institute) at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Research and Information in Health Economics (IRDES).

Mélanie Requier-Desjardins, PhD in Environmental Economics, is a member of the French Scientific Committee on Desertification. She has worked within African nomadic communities on common pastures management and is currently coordinating the Environment Program at OSS which is an African FW of partnership for harnessing and sharing scientific information for SNRM (land and water).

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