Social capital and the policy for sustainable places

Abstract

A place-based policy for country side development has to start by an inventory of the assets available for the place, or if larger - the region, under study. Given this, a sustainable development of the place implies that the assets of the place are maintained in such a way that future generations own and have access to an equal or larger amount of assets per capita. The place and its inhabitants have become richer. While a policy for sustainability at the global level implies making all resource constraints explicit to decision makers, establishment of arenas and structures for the handling of conflicts, structures for production and distribution, formulation of principles and schemes for compensation between generations over time as well as among actors at a given time, a place-based policy for "a subset of the earth" needs even further considerations. The place-based policy for sustainability has directly to handle, respond to and take care of the mobility of some assets in response to changes in attractiveness between the place and other locations on earth. The social capital of the place is in this perspective one of its most central and important assets. It represents a shared resource for the place. The size and depth of this social capital is in some respects dependent on its amount of human and knowledge capital. It may be dependent on specific groups of individuals but it has in the best of stances to some extent become an impersonal, institutional, organised, shared resource for the place that may be and is renewed by open invitation of new members into its organisations and structures. Through its social capital, the place offers a set of institutions for dealing with membership, choice of leaders, and conflict resolution. The spatial extension of a place, given by its more or less visible and definite borders in relation to other places, is also a function of its amount of assets such as its buildings, public spaces, military utilities, other artefacts and their relation to each other. Nature and its ecological capital may furthermore set physical limits for the extension of a place. Such borders may more or less well reflect the domain of a place, its area or networks of political and economic influence. Of all its assets, the social capital is then especially important since the domain of the place is formed by the extension, functioning and strength of the social networks; organisations, mental maps, institutions and beliefs held by the people in the place utilizing its artefacts and ecosystems. If the place only has weak and fragile organisations with minor resources and unclear structures for decision making, the place may easily lead away from a sustainable path. Mobile assets will sooner or later leave the place. Since people in theory, and in practice if they are in control of suitable capital, are mobile. A place is, both through the complete set of its artefacts and other more immobile asset, and perhaps also in a tacit way, dependent on the relation people have to the place, their place dependence. There is thus always a latent conflict but also a possibility to gain mutual benefits from interaction between the individual, the social network and the place. The degree of sustainability of a place is dependent on the possibility to make all, and especially easily mobile assets immobile and place dependent. The formation of organisations, e.g. based on social capital, are ways to tie mobile assets into place dependent structures through the advantage and attractiveness offered by the shared resources and the production of club goods. In this chapter we initially discuss the character of assets related to places. Then we put this in relation to the sustainability of a place and suggest definitions of place related sustainability. After some empirical observations of the balance sheet of assets and having related this to growth, we discuss how a place may organise itself in order to attract mobile assets and to gain as much as possible from its shared resources through club formation.