Emergence of Social Capital

Emergence of the concept of ‘social capital’ into development literature dates back to the period of post-World War II. Since then it has received considerable attention among sociologists, economists and political scientists and has reputed for its capacity in delivering benefits such as welfare of the society, better care of children, improved government responses, better health care and lowering social injustice. Furthermore, it is considered as an emerging area of inquiry with agencies such as World Bank and the OECD.
The thrust of this paper however, is to emphasise the necessity to build social capital in developing world to empower the communities to have sufficient resources to hold their governments accountable and to facilitate their entry into market economies. To begin, I will be defining some of the basic terms used in the argument to provide theoretical grounding extracting most notable authors in this approach and then discuss the role of social capital in holding governments accountable followed by its role in market economy.
Definition of terms
The concept of social capital is multi-dimensional in nature and related to the social relationships in general. Therefore the structure of the relationship and quality of are important in dealing with social capital. The different magnitudes of it as studied by scholars in this sphere are discussed below to draw the definition for social capital.
Social Capital as Coleman (1989) defined by its function, “is not a single entity but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors-whether persons or corporate actors-within the structure”. Definition by Fukuyama (...

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