Bridging vs. Bonding Social Capital and the Management of Common Pool Resources / Kathy Baylis, Yazhen Gong, Shun Wang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baylis, Kathy.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gong, Yazhen.

Wang, Shun.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w19195.

NBER working paper series no. w19195

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.

Summary:

Social capital can facilitate community governance, but not all social capital is alike. We distinguish bonding social capital (within a village) from bridging social capital (between villages), and we compare their effects on the management of a common pool resource. We develop a theoretical model and show that bonding social capital can improve common pool resource management, while the effect of bridging social capital is mixed. We test these findings using primary data from Yunnan, China on social capital and firewood collection on communal lands. We find that bonding social capital decreases the consumption of the common pool resource, and bridging social capital erodes the effect of bonding. Bridging social capital also decreases the use of the common pool resource by villagers who are near subsistence levels of consumption. Our results are robust to alternative measures of social capital and to treating social capital as endogenous.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2013.