The idea that local people are best placed to address local problems is widely accepted, but how can the nature and effectiveness of local capacity be examined? This paper from the journal World Development develops a framework for conceptualising local capacity to address livelihood and governance problems and applies this to recent research from rural Indonesia. It suggests that linking social capital and political economy can better highlight the relationships between social and political agency and political-economic structure at the local level.
Indonesia’s economic crisis of 1997 saw it change from a lower middle income country with an authoritarian regime to a poor one with weakened government. Indonesian village law, in place until 1999, created few incentives for village heads to work for the community or opportunities for villagers to participate in decisions. New legislation offers villagers the chance to play a greater role in their development, but change has not been instant. Studies from 1996-1997 and 2000-02 show that villagers respond to livelihood and governance problems at an individual, household and collective level. Collective responses reflect social relationships, local political context and wider processes of state formation.
The framework developed to understand local capacity has three building blocks:
- An asset-based approach to capacity: Capacity is viewed in terms of the assets, or capital, drawn upon to solve problems. Social capital, referring to networks and relationships, is a key asset. This is further defined as bonding, bridging or linking social capital.
- The political economy of rural development: The distribution of assets and their organisational context depend on relationships between politics, economy and society.
- Sources of capacity building: These include the state, collaboration between local and external civil society organisations and the rural population themselves.
In applying this framework to the example of Indonesia, key findings are:
- The most frequent form of group capacity is initiatives to share resources and spread risk. This is a form of bonding social capital.
- Bridging social capital has previously been weakened by the state – through institutions accountable to higher authorities, encouraging upwardly orientated, favour-seeking behaviour by village leaders.
- Political reform in the late 1990s fostered new forms of bridging, thus increasing villagers’ capacity to address livelihood and governance problems. Villagers are more willing to develop relationships with other groups and protest abuses of local government authority.
This discussion has the following implications for work on local capacity and governance:
- Forms of social capital and their implications for local capacity must be understood in relation to processes of state formation and the political economy of rural development.
- The forms, distribution and effects of social capital cannot easily be understood through political economy analysis alone.
- The idea that capacity can arise from grassroots-level collaboration between local and external civil organisations or state action helps explain the geographical and social distribution of capacity.
- Linking social capital and political economy, and pursuing links through qualitative and ethnographic research, sheds light on the forms and effectiveness of village level collective action.
