Riscurile politicilor de dezvoltare bazate pe formarea capitalului social Risks of development policies based on social capital formation Section Studies and Research Papers

Abstract

The paper considers the existing balance between the bonding and the bridging social capital in Romania, focusing on the risks which might occur for the community development projects. Firstly, a brief review of the literature discuss the bonding/ bridging distinction, its liquidity, the positive and the negative consequences of the existing social capital stocks for the community development. Second, the paper sketched that Romania has low levels of bridging social capital, but the distribution within the society is similar to one from different other European countries. Considering the higher levels of bonding relations and trust, the main section of the paper builds around the possible challenges for the community development projects which consider the use of social capital. Increasing existing inequalities, strengthening too much the bonding social capital, ‘mimed’ and ‘hierarchical associationism’, blocking the values. change, ignoring specific forms of social capital, biased evaluation procedure are among the potential perverse effects analyzed in the paper.