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At the Boundaries of La Política: Political ecology, policy networks and moments of government,

| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in the Handbook of Political Ecology. Edited by G. Bridge, J. McCarthy and T. Perreault. London: Routledge | Abstract: I don’t know if my colleagues in Latin America are political ecologists or not. They probably are, many of them at least. Most of them view natural resources and nature as a terrain […]

Development: Social capital

| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, pp 165-170. Edited by N. Thrift and R. Kitchin. Oxford: Elsevier. | Abstract: The concept of social capital generally refers to the assets that reside within social actors’ relationships. These assets are understood as constituting an important part of people’s identities, livelihood and political strategies, […]

Social capital and development studies II: can Bourdieu travel to policy?

| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in Progress in Development Studies vol. 7 no. 2: 155-162 | Introduction: My first progress report (Bebbington, 2004) focused on the nature of recent debates on social capital and development, and explored some of the institutional contexts that may help explain why the concept became so attractive to some authors and […]

The search for empowerment: Social capital as idea and practice at the World Bank

| Edited by A Bebbington, M. Woolcock, S. Guggenheim, and E. Olson | Published by Kumarian, West Hartford | The contributors to this collection examine the vast bureaucracy of the World Bank and explore the possibilities of internally generated change. The book focuses on the debates within the Bank about the efficacy of social capital […]

Local capacity, village governance and the political economy of rural development in Indonesia

| By A. Bebbington, L. Dharmawan, E. Farmi, and S. Guggenheim | Published in World Development 34(11): 1958-1976 | | Full text (PDF) | Abstract: This paper develops a framework for conceptualizing local capacity to address village level livelihood and governance problems. The framework is based on an analysis of asset distribution, combined with an explicit […]

Social capital and development studies 1: critique, debate, progress?

| By Anthony Bebbington | Published in Progress in Development Studies, 4(4): 343-349 | Abstract: This is the first in a series of short notes on social capital in development studies. Departing from three recent critical interventions (Fine, 2001; Harriss, 2002; Studia Africana, 2002) this first note reflects on the nature of the debate about the concept, […]

Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank

| By Anthony Bebbington, Scott Guggenheim, Elizabeth Olson, and Michael Woolcock | Published in Journal of Development Studies, 40 (5):33-64 | Abstract: This article explores the ways in which discussions of social capital have emerged within the World Bank,and how they interacted both with project practices and with larger debates in the institution. These debates are […]