Search

• This paper examines the economic effects of multiple earthquakes in China using prefecture-level data and a DID approach. • Both moderate and strong earthquakes have a significant long-term negative effect on affected prefectures' GDP per capita. • Earthquakes' effects vary based on government fiscal autonomy, social capital intensity, and infrastructure development. • Household savings rate, fixed asset investment, and innovation mainly contribute to long-term negative effects. This paper examines the short-term and long-term economic impacts of relative-ly small but more frequent earthquakes in China. Using a difference-in-differences approach based on prefecture-level city panel data, combined with a unique data set on seismic events in China, we find that both moderate and strong earthquakes significantly decrease affected prefectures' GDP per capita in the long run. These effects vary depending on the level of local government fiscal autonomy, social capital intensity, and infrastructure development. We also find that three mechanisms contribute to long-term negative effects: the household savings rate, fixed asset investment, and innovation. Our results provide new insights for policymakers to address relatively small disasters, which can have a significant impact on the local economy in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships among social capital, citizen participation, and public sector performance in Thailand. The findings indicate that social networks, a core component of social capital, tend to increase the motivation and ability of Thai citizens to participate in public affairs and thereby tend to increase the effectiveness of public goods provision. Provincial and local authorities do not tend to improve public goods and services a great deal as government resources increase. In Thailand, where the accountability of the public sector is often weak, social capital and citizen participation therefore can improve public sector accountability and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Based on a country-wide survey of 40 civil society organizations in Pakistan, this paper demonstrates that the policy of channeling development aid through NGOs in the South in the name of generating social capital and strengthening civil society is having a reverse impact: organizations reliant on development aid have no members. The survey indicates a strong correlation between receipt of international aid and absence of members; it further demonstrates a strong correlation between aid and rise in material aspirations among leaders of NGOs and lower organizational performance. The paper raises possibility of a causal relation where aid leads to material aspirations among leaders of NGOs, which in turn result in lower performance and an inability to mobilize members. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper combines quantitative and qualitative data to estimate empirically the impact of social capital on household welfare in Bolivia. Social capital measured by memberships in agrarian syndicates and other associations is found to increase household welfare and reduce poverty. As an asset, social capital matters more for the poor than the nonpoor and has greater effect on household welfare than investment in primary education. The paper elaborates on the relation of complementarity and substitution between informal and formal institutions. The relationship between social capital and welfare is modified by the nature and presence of regional organizations that have federated upward from communities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary This paper examines the relationship among gender, social capital, and access to finance of micro, small, and medium enterprises in the manufacturing sector in Viet Nam. Our dataset is from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 results of the Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise Survey in Viet Nam. Using the Heckman technique to control for sample selection bias, the estimates do not provide evidence for discrimination against female-owned enterprises in the formal lending market. Specifically, female entrepreneurs have a higher probability of getting a loan and they pay lower interest rates in comparison with male entrepreneurs. No discrimination in formal credit markets may arise from the preference for informal loans over formal loans as entrepreneurs tend to borrow informal loans before applying for formal ones. Further analysis shows that social capital could facilitate loan applications: firms that have a closer relationship with government officials and other business people can get loans of longer duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Previous literature suggests that social capital at the individual and community levels can contribute significantly to poverty reduction. In this paper we empirically investigate the relationship between social capital and households’ probability of living under poverty. We used a large-scale cross-sectional survey in western Chinese provinces to explore the impact of households’ social capital on four different poverty measures. Our results indicate that in addition to the structural and relational properties of households’ social networks, the types of resources embedded in these networks such as business ties, political ties, and appropriable social organizations can contribute significantly to poverty reduction. Moreover, since our study is situated in China’s emerging economy context, we can thus further explore how variations in macrolevel institutions affect the usefulness of various social resources in reducing poverty. We discovered that the quality of local institutions as measured by local residents’ trust toward the institutions can modulate the effectiveness of political ties and appropriable social organizations, such that the impacts of political ties and appropriable social organizations tend to diminish in communities with higher level of institutional trust than they are in communities with lower level of institutional trust, while business ties turn out to be effective in alleviating poverty in both high- and low-trust communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Community-driven development rests on the principle of development aid through community participation, which is expected to promote pro-social behavior. This paper studies the impact of such a program in Morocco on social capital as measured by economic field experiments. We played a public goods game to measure how much people care about others in the community, an investment game to proxy interpersonal trust, as well as a dictator game to measure altruism. Our empirical strategy exploits an administrative rule stipulating that the program be rolled out only in rural communities with a poverty rate of 30% and above. Focusing on communities close to this cut-off and using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the program increases contributions in public goods games. Conversely, the program has no impact on altruism and reduces interpersonal trust. We examine possible mechanisms underlying the observed impacts by combining the behavioral data with survey information and administrative records on project spending and selection. Overall our results suggest that a shift from a centralized to a more localized decision-making process may enhance people’s sense of responsibility toward their community, but not all forms of social capital are positively affected in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary As concerns about anthropogenically driven marine resource decline continue, rights-based approaches to fisheries governance have gained attention. Territorial User Rights (TURF) is one example increasingly promoted to enhancing sustainability of small-scale fisheries. Despite rising global interest empirical inquiry into the factors contributing to TURF outcomes remains limited and focus has centered on the ecological and fisheries outcomes, largely neglecting documentation of social consequences and social determinants of success. This paper aims to move the theoretical and empirical work on the role of social capital and leadership in natural resource governance (particularly fisheries) forward by deepening the discussion around the conceptualization and operationalization of social capital. We also extend empirical work on TURF performance by examining multiple social and ecological outcomes. We put forth four theoretically informed propositions about the relationship between key explanatory variables and outcomes. Using empirical data from six Chilean Territorial User Rights areas we provide an early assessment of the validity of these propositions using a case comparative approach, and test their usefulness in operationalizing and analyzing such multifaceted data. Findings show that social capital may not be a useful predictor of success, while the presence of engaged leadership and agreement among members around sanctions appears more closely linked to performance across all social and ecological outcome variables. A key finding is that the use of social capital as a broad term encompassing multiple pro-social variables may not be a fruitful way forward for improving our understanding of the determinants of success in resource management. Instead results indicate that leadership interacts with specific aspects of what is generally referred to as social capital to affect outcomes. To allow theoretical refinement and hypotheses testing regarding determinants of governance outcomes we suggest the social processes measured under the broad umbrella of social capital should be kept separate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Investment varies across municipalities depending on mayoral political alignment. • Pork-barrelling is due to the electoral interests of the central government. • There is no electoral motifs when investment is administered to citizen committees. • Social capital reduces the margin for arbitrary allocations of investment. • The implications for grant design and metropolitan governance are discussed. This paper analyses the incidence of political factors and social capital on the allocation of public investment in the Santiago Metropolitan Area, Chile. Considering panel data on a decentralized investment program distributed through local governments and a program that is geared directly to citizen organizations, the paper explores whether investment is equally subject to electoral concerns and rent seeking under different program designs. Our estimations show that decentralized investment favours aligned municipalities where competition is stronger, but long-lasting local leaders also seek their own benefits. By contrast, transfers directly channelled to beneficiaries are free from political clout and, additionally, there is no sign of capture by organized interests. Based on these results, the paper discusses the implications for metropolitan governance, highlighting the potential role of the local social capital and a two-tier governance scheme to retain the gains from decentralization, acquire economies of scale in metropolitan service provision and reduce the margin for pork barrelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Families able to sustain poverty escapes typically possess a combination of material wealth and social capital. • Better-off households are able to draw on social capital in response to shocks that could otherwise precipitate declines in wellbeing. • Social events which sustain social capital can be a double-edged sword, due to expectations of reciprocity difficult for poor families. • Some poor families take credit and become indebted, or sell off livestock and limit their ability to cope with agricultural and other shocks. What enables social capital to contribute to sustained poverty escapes, and what could compensate for the negative effects of adverse social norms that inhibit pathways out of poverty? This paper seeks to answer these questions in Ethiopia by analysing three rounds of the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey (2011/12, 2013/14, and 2015/16) alongside fieldwork in Tigray, Amhara, Oromia, and SNNPR comprising focus group discussions, life history interviews, and key informant interviews. The study finds that families able to sustain poverty escapes typically possess a combination of material wealth, human, political and social capital, all underpinned by an enabling environment marked by factors including an evolving education system and pro-poor political settlement. Better-off households are then able to draw on social capital during shocks that could otherwise precipitate declines in wellbeing. However, the social events which sustain social capital can be a double-edged sword. Families may spend much on weddings, funerals, children's christenings and birthdays, and inaugurations of newly houses. Reciprocity is expected when organizing these feasts, which poor families find difficult to maintain. Accordingly, some take credit and become indebted, others sell livestock and limit their ability to cope with shocks, and some young people are also forced to migrate to generate income to settle family debt. Based on these findings, policy suggestions are offered, such as through promoting public discussion of migration risks and mitigation of these risks, group-based insurance to help support costs for feasts, and expanding the scope of PSNP transfers to recognize the importance of idiosyncratic shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Value chains are an increasingly popular approach to understanding complex policy challenges in agricultural development. However, value chain research and development has often been too narrowly focused on the structural elements of production, resulting in lack of adaptive capacity. Drawing on the concept of communities of practice, this paper seeks to operationalize an understanding of how the social relations that underpin smallholder-related value chains can be better supported to enhance resilience. Case studies from the Caribbean are then used to illustrate how a community of practice approach to value chain development might facilitate the formation of social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Based on a study of how rural land brokers mediate the arrival of a Special Economic Zone in rural Rajasthan, this paper argues that theories of collective social capital cannot explain how networks, norms, and trust interact in a process of economic change. It then reconstructs Bourdieu’s distinct theory of individual social capital by showing how better-connected farmers are able to broker land and capture profits at the expense of fellow villagers, undermining trust, norms, and collective action. It argues that social capital is most plausibly seen as an aspect of social inequality that hinders inclusive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust links citizens to the institutions intended to represent them and to one another. By reducing trust, crime has the potential to grind down social capital and become an obstacle to development. This paper analyzes the relationship between individual victimization and trust in Latin America using an empirical strategy that reduces both overt and hidden biases. Victimization significantly reduces vertical trust (in the local police) but has no robust effect on measures of horizontal trust. Governments need to reduce actual victimization but also rebuild trust in local public institutions to enhance the effectiveness of crime prevention efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Co-management, in combination with social capital, is expected to improve social–ecological outcomes in protected areas. This paper builds a model of how co-management and social capital are linked, and it investigates how they have changed over time. We emphasize that considering the temporal aspect is crucial for assessing co-management and social capital. The following factors were found to facilitate co-management: a Participatory Advisory Council as a negotiation arena that links with a community-based organization; rotating meeting location to encourage community involvement; a committed Park director and sufficient staff. A co-management process requires ongoing investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper uses the variations of ethnic diversity between districts in Indonesia to show that diversity leads to lower social capital outcomes. I find that distinguishing between ethnic polarization and fractionalization matters for the results, as polarization has a larger negative effect. The results cannot entirely be attributed to selection on unobservables, and at least part of the relationship should be interpreted as causal. Finally, diversity seems to increase tolerance, despite its negative effect on other social capital variables such as trust, perceived safety, and participation to community activities, and voting in elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper explores how village level technology usage patterns and bonding social capital (the strength of intra-communal links) mutually influence the individual usage decision of an improved stove in the Peruvian Andes. It shows that the individual usage likelihood is more responsive to village usage patterns if communal bonding links are relatively strong, and that bonding social capital discourages individual usage if the proportion of beneficiaries experiencing usage problems is relatively high. Usage problems were mainly related to faulty stove’s materials, which were likely exogenous to households’ characteristics. Social capital was measured before the intervention, which alleviates reverse causality issues. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper investigates whether a big push to the extreme poor in terms of a one-off large grant enables them to participate in the microfinance program. The analysis uses data from a quasi-experiment on BRAC’s ultra poor program in Bangladesh. The results for the baseline and repeat survey data for the treatment and comparison groups show that such a big push does make a significant impact on graduation to the microfinance program. The results are robust to correction for self-selection bias. Social capital and awareness also play important role in their decision on NGO membership and borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper reports on a four-site study conducted in the Sahelian zone of Niger. The study takes a novel mixed methods approach for understanding conflict management from the perspective of rural peoples by not only describing past highly publicized conflicts but also by analyzing the steps rural peoples follow to management disagreements that arise in their everyday lives. This “bottom-up” approach reveals both a capacity and preference among our informants to manage disagreements informally without involving village or extra-village authorities. Decentralization initiatives, by reworking the authority and responsibilities of authority-based systems, affect the role that these informal mechanisms, as mediated by social norms and relations, play in conflict management. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Following the disputed 2007 Kenyan Presidential election unprecedented levels of violence erupted across the country adding to the history of troubled elections in Africa. This paper offers quantitative and qualitative evidence on the issues that triggered the electoral violence, its incidence, and impacts. Using two surveys conducted before and after the election we find that one out of three Kenyans was affected by the violence regardless of their ethnicity and wealth. The chances of being a victim of violence were higher in areas with land conflicts and where politically-connected gangs operated. Violence, which was mainly triggered by the perception that the election had been rigged, increased support toward lawlessness, reduced trust and social capital among communities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Community-based development projects are often argued to strengthen social capital. This paper investigates the impact of a women’s empowerment program in India on trust and cooperation, using data on 2,000 households. The program significantly increases trust and stimulates contributions to educational and infrastructural community projects. The effect on informal assistance among households is less consistent. The findings suggest substantial spillovers on the wider community. Households who do not participate in the program themselves but who live in a program village are significantly more trusting and more likely to engage in collective action than households in control villages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The aim of this paper is threefold. First, to describe the general evolution of bonding and bridging social capital in Jordan. Second, to explore the role of state policies in affecting the various forms of social capital. Finally, to analyze how poverty and economic reform influence the extent and nature of social capital. Social networks, a crucial element of social capital, and cleavages are strongly affected by political and economic dislocations. The former include wars and civil wars, while the latter include state policies and economic conditions. Thus wasta, an old but still significant form of social capital in the Arab World, becomes helpful in good times but destructive in bad times. Successful economic reform requires a good understanding of the nature of social relations and of the ways in which social networks themselves are used by members during good times and bad times for both survival and advancement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Self-help groups (SHGs) are now viewed as promising platforms for multiple development interventions for several reasons. • Study provides qualitative insights on dynamics of SHG meeting attendance in SHG-led health intervention in India. • Finds meeting regularity and attendance are barriers to wide coverage, particularly for most vulnerable women. • Social capital developed between SHGs and sponsor organization is critical to successfully layer health interventions. • Social capital between SHG and sponsoring organization is developed through benefits received from past association. Women-led self-help groups (SHGs) are increasingly being utilized as platforms for delivering development activities by funding agencies and governmental bodies. However, there is currently little understanding as to whether SHGs are effective or equitable platforms for delivering health or livelihoods interventions. Social capital is hypothesized as a comparative advantage when utilizing SHGs as development platforms, however the specific mechanisms have yet to be explored. This paper investigates the efficacy and equity of SHGs as platforms for development programs through analyzing 64 interviews and 6 focus group discussions collected from an agriculture and behavior change intervention delivered through SHGs in eastern India. We find that while, theoretically, SHGs are a promising platform for health messaging this is largely dependent on SHG norms of attendance, which itself is closely tied to socioeconomic conditions and social capital. Social capital is important both within SHGs as well as between SHGs and the implementing organization. Sites with more mature SHGs had greater economic security allowing more active participation in the intervention than sites with more poverty and young SHGs. The former sites also had greater norms of trust and reciprocity (social capital) with the implementing organization that led them to accept additional interventions. In the latter sites, SHG members had competing demands on their time and less trust in the implementers, making it difficult to attend both SHG meetings and health sessions. We put forth a materialist understanding of social capital formation, where SHG members must have already received substantive benefit from membership for new activities to be successfully incorporated into their agenda. Further, using SHGs as a nutrition message delivery platform should not detract from individual engagement with more vulnerable members of the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigate the impact of a natural disaster on social capital. • We use an original dataset collected in rural Ecuador a few months after a volcanic eruption. • We provide suggestive evidence that individuals use the shock to free ride solidarity mechanisms. • The magnitude of this effect decreases with the level of wealth inequality and vanishes in the most unequal communities. This paper investigates the impact of natural disasters on social capital. By heterogeneously affecting people in a community, natural disasters create a temporary information asymmetry on their post-disaster income. Using an original dataset collected in rural Ecuador, we provide suggestive evidence that households use this asymmetric information to pretend to be poorer than they actually are, in order to escape from solidarity mechanisms in the aftermath of the shock. The magnitude of this effect decreases with the level of wealth inequality in the community and vanishes in the most unequal communities where bilateral cooperation is rather fostered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper examines attempts by community-based conservation (CBC) to integrate conservation and development. It investigates the dynamic interrelation between internal and external institutions; and between conservation and development of indigenous CBC initiatives in Taiwan, drawing the following major conclusion. The development-through-conservation approach, having conservation as a priority, generally leads to better integration, since this approach contributes to building social capital, fostering collective action and strengthening the institutional capacity needed for sustainable development. By contrast, owing to elite capture and interest heterogeneity, the conservation-through-development approach that emphasizes development first tends to undermine collective action, and hence jeopardizes internal institution building and resultant outcomes. This study suggests that priority should be given to conservation rather than development efforts, especially when internal institutions are still weak. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Critical to the success of community development is the degree to which citizens contribute their resources. The paper develops regression models to examine the effects of household and community characteristics on household contributions of time and money to three types of participatory community development efforts: governance, social welfare, and environmental infrastructure. Households with indicators of lower socio-economic status generally contributed less time and money to community development. Integration into social networks was also a strong predictor of the amount of time a household contributed. Because most of the community development efforts analyzed rely on reciprocity, where participants contribute resources in order to receive benefits, the findings raise doubts about the extent to which these efforts help the poor and socially excluded. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: In this paper, I illustrate the effects of different types of social ties on the welfare of Indonesian households and draw out implications for debates around state and community development efforts, empirical analysis, and project design. Guided by social capital theory, the analysis indicates that certain social ties can be a means of improving welfare for poor families. The distribution of different ties varies with socio-economic class, however, and each type is linked to distinct resources. The distribution of ties may be shifting in Indonesia, with greater access for poor households to state-sponsored ties and accompanying resources. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper develops a framework for conceptualizing local capacity to address village level livelihood and governance problems. The framework is based on an analysis of asset distribution, combined with an explicit analysis of the links between processes of state formation, state-business linkages and local forms of social capital. The framework is used to discuss findings from recent research on village capacity in rural Indonesia. The discussion suggests that it is possible to link a political, economic approach to rural development with recent conceptualizations of social capital. Such an analysis can illuminate the forms taken by and the effectiveness of village level collective action in ways that either purely political economy or social capital approaches do not. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper identifies factors associated with high repayment performance by collectively liable groups of seed borrowers in Southern Zambia. The results suggest that some factors facilitating collective action within seed groups, such as their size, are associated with a higher repayment performance. In addition, community-based cognitive social capital, proxied here by generalized trust, is shown to be strongly associated with repayment performance. This suggests that attitudes and values shared by community members create an environment in which seed borrowers honor their engagements, although church participation and fear of witchcraft can weaken mutual monitoring of loan use and peer pressure for repayment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper empirically examines the role of community social capital in the individual’s health production function. We focus on health measures relating to physical as well as mental health. In addition to exploring the relationship between social capital and health, we test for interrelationships between social and human capital in the production of health. Data come from more than 10000 adults surveyed in the Indonesian Family Life Surveys of 1993 and 1997. We identify a robust positive empirical association between community-level social capital and good health. We find weak evidence for an interrelationship between human and social capital and mental health. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper seeks to contribute to an improved understanding of the gender aspects of social capital manifested in groups for natural resource management (NRM). We investigated how gender differentiated social groups differ in their activities and outcomes for NRM. A total of 46 men’s, mixed, and women’s groups were analyzed in 33 rural programs in 20 countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Significant gender differences were found in relation to group maturity and NRM achievements and approaches as well as important differences in experiences of collaboration and capacity to manage conflict. Overall, we found that collaboration, solidarity, and conflict resolution all increase in groups where women are present. In addition, norms of reciprocity are more likely to operate in women’s and mixed groups. Similarly, the capacity for self-sustaining collective action increased with women’s presence and was significantly higher in the women’s groups. The results demonstrate the importance of gender analysis for collective NRM and particularly the role of women for collaboration in and sustainability of NRM groups. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper draws on ethnographic research in Tanzania to question ideas inherent to mainstream development policy that building social capital can be readily created, used, or substituted for other missing assets, and thereby overcome poverty. The poorest experience clusters of interlocking disadvantage that make it highly unlikely that they can draw on social capital to ameliorate their poverty, or that increased association and participation at community level is necessarily beneficial to them. Moreover, social relationships, collective action, and local institutions may structurally reproduce the exclusion of the poorest. As such, a politically neutral and undersocialized policy focus on strengthening associational life and public participation of the poor is unlikely to lead to their greater inclusion, nor to significant poverty alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores one process through which Zimbabwean farmers resettled at independence transformed their new co-villagers from strangers into neighbours. They invested in civil society. Two decades on, resettled villagers engage in twice as much civil social activity as nonresettled villagers and may have, thus, compensated for the lower incidence of kinship ties and greater ethnic diversity among neighbors. Within villages, the elderly are more active. These results suggest that development practitioners could influence the evolution of civil society within resettlements. But, the relative welfare effects of kin-based and civic-based social capital need to be established before they do so. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper argues that resettlement affects the way households cope with crisis situations. Information on Zimbabwean households shows that households in resettlement areas are more likely to develop individual strategies, while households in communal areas are more likely to receive assistance from someone in their support network. Quantitative analysis shows these differences can partly be attributed to differences in wealth and kin relationships within villages, while qualitative data suggest there is also a difference in the attitude of resettlement farmers, and attitudes toward resettlement farmers, that might make it more difficult for them access assistance when it is needed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• We assess the impact of communal versus public water provision on child health in Peru. • Identification strategy based on the discontinuity in the type of provision across district sub-units. • Communal organizations result in better health outcomes in historical Inca settlements. • Long-standing effects of the Minka tradition of collective work. • Social norms and traditions are important for the success of communal projects. Communal water organizations are widespread in many areas of developing countries, where local governments lack the resources to offer a minimum quality water service. However, these organizations have their own resource limitations and they additionally face the well-known problems associated with collective action. It is therefore unclear how effectively they can provide safe water, and the evidence available thus far is mixed. This paper analyzes the communal water organizations in Peru known as Juntas Administrativas de Servicios de Saneamiento (JASS). Using detailed household survey data, we empirically assess the differential impact of the JASS vis-à-vis public systems on two water-related child health outcomes: diarrhea and low birth weight. Our identification strategy exploits the legislative changes introduced in the 2000s and the arbitrary cut-off to classify the administrative sub-units of Peruvian municipalities (districts) in order to achieve exogenous variation in the type of water provision. We find that child diarrhea and low birth weight are significantly lower for households served by JASS in the districts located in the first Inca settlements where the pre-Columbian tradition of communal work, called Minka, has survived over centuries. We also show that in those districts the JASS have better governance (existence of their own rules, higher participation and accountability and a greater ability to obtain external support). These findings confirm the hypothesis that social capital and traditions foster cooperation among community members and are in line with recent works showing the importance of historically developed institutions in building social capital. More generally, our results suggest that communal organizations are not a one-fits-all solution, but rather their success depends crucially on the existence of mechanisms for overcoming the problems associated with collective action and the active involvement of the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Fishermen use lies and ruse to bond, complicating notions of trust in CBNRM and favoring critical theories of social capital. • Joking deceptions help men draw social boundaries and maintain harmony amidst competition for natural resources. • Analysis of gendered social capital and masculinity reveals norms that shape resistance to externally-driven conservation. • Social capital accrual and networks of trust can vary with differing resource pools, even among the same group of users. This paper relates how fishermen in San Evaristo on Mexico's Baja peninsula employ fabrications to strengthen bonds of trust and navigate the complexities of common pool resource extraction. We argue this trickery complicates notions of social capital in community-based natural resource management, which emphasize communitarianism in the form of trust. Trust, defined as a mutual dependability often rooted in honesty, reliable information, or shared expectations, has long been recognized as essential to common pool resource management. Despite this, research that takes a critical approach to social capital places attention on the activities that foster social networks and their norms by arguing that social capital is a process. A critical approach illuminates San Evaristeño practices of lying and joking across social settings and contextualizes these practices within cultural values of harmony. As San Evaristeños assert somewhat paradoxically, for them "lies build trust." Importantly, a critical approach to this case study forces consideration of gender, an overlooked topic in social capital research. San Evaristeña women are excluded from the verbal jousting through which men maintain ties supporting their primacy in fishery management. Both men's joke-telling and San Evaristeños' aversion to conflict have implications for conservation outcomes. As a result, we use these findings to help explain local resistance to outsiders and external management strategies including land trusts, fishing cooperatives, and marine protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]