Social Capital And Community Development

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Since the early 1990s, “social capital” has become one of the important terms in the development dictionary. It is adopted widely by national governments, Non-government organizations (NGOs), and community development agencies. In the last two decades,It has been deeplyencouraged by the World Bank as the “missing link” in development. As well as Current social capital literature has extended social capital concept from an individual attribute to a characteristic of communities. As a community-level attribute, social capital has been Progressively linked to community development of rural and regional area. As well as,There is developing empirical evidence that social capital plays significantly to rural and regional improvement with the sustainable …show more content…

However, Rural communities have played an important role in the society. They have reinforced traditional values of community, supported ideals of individualism. Both community and regional development rely on inputs from and interactionsbetween various forms of capital including financial, physical, environmental, human, andsocial. Within this context, capital is defined as a resource that is reinvested to create newresources (Flora et al., 1992:133). Each form of capital is important because of its ability tobenefit the productivity and efficiency of other forms of capital. For example, social capital encourages trusting and cooperative relationships that ultimately lower transaction costs,thereby making physical, human, and financial capital more efficient (Burt. 1992; Flora andFlora, 1994; Smith, 2002).But In most of developing countries, economics and social analysts often observe countries with similar endowments of natural, human capital and physical achieving different levels of economic achievement. Grootaert and Bastelaer(2002) confirmed that the role of social capital in term of generating positive contribution to economic and social well-being of the community. However, concept of social capital from an economic perspective has not yet been demonstrated as the part of rural and regional community development program in most of developing countries.However, so far, there are no sufficient studies which attempt to realize the impact of social capital on rural and regional community development in Sri Lanka. Existing literature in the field do not provide adequate empirical evidence on link between social capital development and rural and regional community developmentin Sri Lanka. Therefore, it is well-time to analyze the impact of social capital development on rural and regional community

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