OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

1. USING A TERRITORY’S CULTURE TO PROMOTE LOCAL DEVELOPMENT
they appear. This difference comes from a difference in social capital, or the ability
to work together, which depends on the standards and values that communities
share, and also on the willingness of individuals to subordinate their interests
to those of the larger group. It is from these shared values that trust is born 14 .
Trust, then, allows us to create social capital, which can be defined as an asset
that emerges when trust predominates within a society or within certain parts
of it. (Fukuyama, 2002) 15 .
- Fukuyama’s approach broadens the economic scope of Putnam’s analysis. But
it also contains an element of circularity and voluntarism. Some values or norms
are positive, but only if they become habitual and generalised. The social
capital needed to create a moral community requires the inculcation of moral
norms in the community and, in this context, the acquisition of virtues such as
loyalty, honesty and dependability. Moreover, the group as a whole must adopt
common norms, if the radius of trust is to embrace all its members. In other words,
social capital relies on the predominance of social over individual virtues 16 .
- These approaches were taken up and amplified in the work launched by the
World Bank in 1996 (the Social Capital Initiative, SCI) and by Stiglitz in his
comments on the differences between types of social capital 17 . Social capital
can be assimilated with other forms of capital through the aid of economic
concepts: by economising on transaction costs, social capital could enhance
economic efficiency.
Social capital, then, is seen as the means of moving beyond explanations of
development that rely solely on agents’ intentions. It makes it possible to reconcile
the economist’s rational individual, whose actions reflect his choices, with the
sociologist’s object of study, whose actions are guided by norms, rules and obligations
(Coleman, 1988). Here, the prime role is given to the phenomena of repetition, games,
networks and trust. Trust becomes synonymous with the proper functioning of networks,
which reinforces trust, hence the analogy with accumulation 18 . In his Determinants of
Democracy, Barro reveals a correspondence between social capital (assimilated here
to democracy) and economic development (Barro, 1999) 19 . Paxton, in “Social Capital
and Democracy: an Interdependent Relationship” (Paxton, 2002), uses data from the
World Values Series and the International Yearbook of Organisations to show that
associations and trust have positive effects on democracy and on economic
development 20 .
Thus the elements that were successively described by Hume (the moral sense),
de Tocqueville (the civic sense) and Weber (the influence of values), while they are
not forgotten, now tend to be relegated to the analytical background. The influence
of culture is not banished by the simple play of interactions and repetitions, because
their inadequate functioning is never more than the manifestation of faulty development,
30 CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005