Social Capital and Development Approaches From the Point of View of the World Bank

This paper investigates how the term social capital is involved in the World Bank's discussions of development, as well as how the World Bank has developed the term and integrated it into new development approaches. Though social capital was initially discussed by Bourdieu and Coleman, the concept became widely known after the studies of Putnam. While discussing and analyzing errors and failures of development projects, some research groups within the World Bank incorporated the concept of social capital into the process, and began to create new approaches toward development. One of the most important approaches belongs to Woolcock, who is very critical of the World Bank's development policies. First, Woolcock investigated the reasons behind the bank's failures, then analyzed these development plans from the perspective of social capital, and designed a new theoretical framework for the bank's social capital debates. The main subject of this paper is compiling these new approaches developed by Woolcock in order to gain insights into Turkey's developmental perspective.