 | Contemporary Theory Social Capital and Civic Innovation
Learning and Capacity Building from the 1960s to the 1990s Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland Carmen Sirianni is editor-in-chief of the Civic Practices Network, and teaches sociology, civic innovation and public policy at Brandeis University. Lewis Friedland is the research director of the Civic Practices Network, and teaches in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he heads the broadcast and online programs. This paper was originally presented at the Social Capital session of the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, August 20, 1995 Washington, D.C. Copyright © 1995 by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland. Contents Introduction
Historical Context
Social Capital
Civic and Grassroots Environmentalism
Community Organizing and Development
Some Concluding Thoughts
References Introduction In recent years, as part of broader effort to renew the foundations of democracy, social theorists have focused increasing attention on civil society, social capital and deliberative democracy. In this essay, we examine some of these issues in the context of participatory democratic innovation as an historical process of social learning and capacity building from the 1960s to the present in the United States. In particular, we will try to make sense of this process in terms of social capital—its complex, even paradoxical, development and depletion over the course of this period. We focus here on two arenas of participatory innovation: 1) civic and grassroots environmentalism, and 2) community organizing and community development. Since our aim is to develop theory with practical intent, we draw from a series of action research projects within the "new citizenship" or "civic renewal" movement in which we and our colleagues have been involved, as well as from historical analysis and over two hundred interviews with civic practitioners during 1993-95. The latter range from grassroots community organizers and support network staff to agency officials and professional consultants in these two, as well as related areas of participatory innovation.1 Historical Context The recent emergence of a civic renewal movement (American Civic Forum, 1994; Gardner 1994; Broder 1994) as well as the heightened public interest in questions of social capital and community problem solving , of course, needs to be understood in social and historical context. As a beginning, we focus on several long-term trends, though these are clearly part of a broader crisis of institutions and governance in democratic societies of the West. The first is that a newer, elite-directing mode of participation has steadily gained strength relative to an older, elite-directed mode. As Ingelhart (1990) argues, this newer mode is the result of the improvement of individual-level preconditions for political participation (rising levels of education, political information etc.), and a simultaneous decline in the hierarchical organizations (political parties, labor unions, religious organizations) that once mobilized mass political participation so effectively. The profound and systemic disintegration of parties in the United States, for instance, has continued steadily for more than a century, interrupted only temporarily by the New Deal, and is manifest in popular partisan dealignment and a declining capacity of parties to aggregate interests (Silbey 1990). The long-term trends that account for this—the rise of a nonpartisan civil service, the shift from generalized distributive policies to new regulative channels, the increase in the numbers and activities of specialized nonpartisan interest groups—have been exacerbated by the post-1960s explosion of social movement, public interest and consumer groups capable of lobbying and agenda setting independent of previous elite-directed modes (Ingelhart 1990: 339; Berry 1989; Baumgartner and Jones 1993), as well as by participatory reforms in party rules (Shafer 1983; Polsby 1983; Dionne 1991, 46-50), and by other changes in media and campaign technologies (Ganz 1993). Party loyalty has become increasingly conditional on performance, and cognitively mobilized nonpartisans are a growing group within the electorate, and the basis for ongoing processes of political realignment. Secondly, the steady rise of an elite-directing mode has also been manifest in the enormous extension of citizen participation rights, especially in the 1968-74 period, which underlay the shift from the New Deal regulatory regime to the public lobby regulatory regime. Some of these rights accrued through the extension of principles of pluralist representation and open deliberation within administrative law. Others were secured through legislation pressed by groups mobilized explicitly around the theme of participatory democracy (Harris and Milkis 1989; see also Melnick 1983; Hoberg 1992). In both cases, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a profound impact. Citizens now have an enormous array of formal rights to voice, as well as an equally formidable range of opportunities to obstruct decision-making and implementation. Thirdly, the complexity of problems—and/or our appreciation of their complexity—has steadily increased, and the capacity of top-down regulatory, redistributive, and professional social welfare techniques for solving these has declined. Rights-based strategies that juridify and bureaucratize schooling, for instance, can undermine essential aspects of responsible and effective teaching and learning (Habermas 1988; Johnson 1990), especially in a complex postindustrial environment that requires flexibility and collaboration (Fiske 1991). In an aging society with increasing chronic illness and long-term care issues, and the steady advance of expensive medical technology that can always promise to improve quality of life and life expectancy at the margins, it is not possible to control health costs—and, in the U.S., probably not possible to achieve universality—through redistribution and administrative rationalization alone (Callahan 1993; Gaylin 1993; Kari, Boyte, and Jennings 1994). Top-down regulatory tools can have only limited impact on a whole range of environmental problems that stem from nonpoint sources, require prevention and alternative methods of production, and depend on enhanced learning capacities and cultural changes at the individual and family level, as well as in the broad community of regulatory actors (Roy 1992; John 1994). Professional casework techniques of the "therapeutic state" (Polsky 1991; Stone 1993) or "therapeutocracy" (Habermas 1988) demonstrate limited capacity to solve a myriad of interconnected social problems, from teen pregnancy and alcoholism to family and youth violence, and are purchased at considerable cost to personal autonomy, democratic citizenship, and normative integration by self-regulating communities. These kinds of complex problems, and many more like them, have called forth civic innovation of various sorts. Learning communities based on collaborative learning, interdisciplinary teams, parental involvement, and organizational flexibility have emerged in an increasing number of schools. Deliberative health values forums and collaborative community health projects have developed in various states to address cost, inclusion, technology, and quality of life. Community dispute resolution, ecosystems management, "good neighbor agreements," and complex institutional collaborations have advanced a distinctively civic environmentalism. And empowerment strategies have continued to spread and challenge the therapeutic techniques and discourses of the social work profession. But civic innovation remains constricted by the dominant form of the newer, elite-directing mode of participation itself, namely public interest group representation. The latter does permit much greater precision and detail in the representation of individual and group preferences through issue-oriented lobbying and agenda setting than does the preceding elite-directed mode (Ingelhart 1990; Baumgartner and Jones 1993). But it has revealed serious limits in its capacities to innovate to solve complex public problems (Rauch 1994), to aggregate interests, or to represent a broader public good (Reich 1988; Sunstein 1988, 1993). And it has eroded broader civic identities that sustain everyday public work in solving problems, and has encouraged a balkanization of entitlement claims and victim statuses. 2 Furthermore, the rise of this elite-directing mode of participation seems to have occurred simultaneously with the erosion of social capital during the same period (Putnam 1995), and hence a decline of the problem-solving capacities associated with stocks of this. Social Capital The work of Robert Putnam (1993a, 1995), James Coleman (1988, 1990), Pierre Bourdieu (1986) and others has recently focused attention on social capital as those features of social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate cooperation for mutual benefit. Putnam (1995: 67) summarizes elegantly a range of social theorizing that leads us to believe that stocks of social capital enhance capacities for community problem solving: In the first place, networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust. Such networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and thus allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved. When economic and political negotiation are embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are reduced. At the same time, networks of civic engagement embody past success at collaboration, which can serve as a cultural template for future collaboration. Finally, dense networks of interaction probably broaden the participants' sense of self, developing the "I" into the "we," or (in the language of rational choice theorists) enhancing the participants "taste" for collective benefits. As Putnam fully recognizes, there are many unanswered questions about the mechanisms through which social capital produces better schools or more effective government, or which types of social capital are needed to help solve which kinds of problems. And there is a host of complex questions about the impact of social policy and the role of administrators, made ever more pressing by a polarized political debate of more state intervention or more markets that tends to ignore the civic fabric in between. Examining civic innovation over the past three decades can help us begin to answer some of these questions, and to get a better understanding of the dynamics of social capital formation within the framework of the broader trends that we have outlined above. We focus here on two areas: a) civic and grassroots environmentalism, and b) community organizing and community development. Civic & Grassroots Environmentalism Beginning in the 1980s, more participatory alternatives to top-down environmental regulation and the public lobby model of formal citizen participation, which often enhanced the rigidity of regulation, started to emerge in the United States. Grassroots groups, particularly in the area of toxics, exploded onto the scene, and a variety of other civic approaches spread more quietly through state and local networks of officials, nonprofit groups, corporate environmental affairs offices and federal regulatory agencies (Sirianni and Friedland 1995; John 1994). But how are we to understand this as a process of social capital building? We would stress several kinds of things here. First, and quite simply, in the area of environmental protection, social capital has had to be self consciously developed. Addressing the complex and relatively new problems of environmental protection could not rely on stocks of social capital as these existed in the 1950s or 1960s. Neither bowling leagues nor church groups addressed these issues. Old conservation groups did so, but the major ones that dominated the scene up until the late 1960s had distinctly technocratic views (Pollack 1985), and the new ones created by the movements of the 1960s and 1970s had quite limited perspectives and capacities for collaborative problem solving at the community level (Gottlieb 1993). Given the complexity of problems, the uncertainty of all regulatory tools available in 1970, and the political opportunity structure that favored a turn to courts and congressional committees (Harris and Milkis 1989), the task of generating new forms of social capital that might address problems effectively was clearly—if only retrospectively—one for extended social learning and capacity building. Measures of the general decline of social capital cannot tell us much about this directly, nor help explain the crisis of institutions and governance in the environmental arena. Even more specific measures can be deceiving. The League of Women Voters, for instance, has experienced a 42 percent decline in its membership from 1969, yet has been an important civic innovator in groundwater, solid waste and other areas, and in forging new kinds of community networks in the environmental arena in this very same period (Sirianni and Friedland 1995; League of Women Voters Education Fund 1994). Second, we need to understand the complex ways that new rights to participation within the public lobby regulatory regime have fostered the development of social capital. There are several major ways that this has been occurring. One is that mandated citizen participation has tended over time to generate valuable experience and personal networks among representatives of various civic and environmental organizations, and between them and corporate environmental affairs officers and agency staff. The participatory water programs of the 1970s, for instance, which were based on a far-reaching mandate of the Clean Water Act of 1972, were disorganized and ineffective in many ways (Cohen 1979; Godschalk and Stiftel 1981; Rosenbaum 1976). But members of local Leagues of Women Voters, state and local chapters of the Sierra Club, and other environmental organizations who took part in them, were often the very same people who in the 1980s helped to develop more effective and collaborative local groundwater approaches, statewide common ground projects, and national estuary programs based on the civic cultivation of a protective ethic with institutional support from EPA (Goslant 1988; Nelson 1990). Another dimension of this is that citizen participation rights have established a much more even balance of power among contending parties, and have given environmental organizations the capacity to impose costs on corporate managers. This power balance has been a precondition for developing forms of collaboration based on increased trust within regulatory communities (Ayers and Braithwaite 1992; Meidinger 1987; Harris 1989). The period in which such rights are initially established and broader participation is mobilized tends to be one of heightened conflict and polarization. Yet actors tend to learn that there are less costly and more collaborative ways to proceed, and new social networks give them the opportunity to pursue these based on the development of trust and recognition of legitimate interests. On the national forests, more deliberative cultures, and the use of alternative dispute resolution, open decision making and ecosystem management emerged only in the wake of an extended period of conflict during which citizen participation mandates were put into effect (Wondolleck 1988; Shannon 1989; Simon, Shands and Liggett 1993). Still one further way that rights can help generate social capital is seen most clearly perhaps in the Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act (EPCRA) of 1986. Passed as part of a highly contested Superfund reauthorization, EPCRA established a Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) of industry output by plant, and thus encouraged not only local involvement, but regional and national support networks to assist citizens in utilizing this geographically-organized database. Aside from enhancing citizen power in legal and regulatory channels, these information rights have enhanced their power in the court of local public opinion, and have thus spurred new norms of voluntary compliance, "good neighbor agreements," and voluntarily established citizen advisory committees to oversee performance (Hadden 1989; Roy 1992; Valelly 1993; Good Neighbor Project 1994; Cohen 1995). In a complex regulatory environment, citizen rights to information become a key mechanism for amplifying reputation within social networks. Third, social capital building in the environmental arena can and has been promoted by administrative action. Of course, one could argue that administrative action has not lived up to its potential—a view WE would certainly share—or that it has also destroyed some kinds of social capital—a possibility that WE would accept in principle, but am more skeptical of measuring empirically. There is a variety of ways that administrators have helped develop social capital. One way is through grants that support local capacity building and broader network formation. EPA grants to support local management conferences within the National Estuaries Program, to aid civic environmental groups such as Save the Bay in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, to establish the independent RTK-Net, and to foster network building within emergent place-driven and sustainable development approaches, are all examples of this. Such administrative strategies within EPA can serve its own need for broad public legitimacy, as well as help generate local public support for taxes and bond issues to improve sewage and treatment facilities and the like (Goslant 1988). The Office of Environmental Justice at EPA has developed a small grants program to develop community groups' capacities to problem solve on toxics and to help generate volunteer efforts from other community institutions, such as churches and local businesses. And with formal rights to participate in setting agency policy established through the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, activist leaders have come to recognize a "new paradigm" (Bullard 1994) within the agency that fosters empowerment, trust building, and problem solving (Gaylord 1994; Knox 1994; Smith 1994). The policy design of Superfund profoundly impairs more deliberative and collaborative responses to toxics (Landy, Roberts and Thomas 1990; Mazmanian and Morell 1992), and thus complicates the capacity building effects of administrative support to local groups. But policy-oriented learning over the past decade has now established a relatively solid knowledge base, if not political calculus, for a more consistently civic approach (Hird 1994; Sirianni and Friedland 1995; Rabe 1994). Administrators have also taken an active role in developing new norms and networks. The Design for the Environment Program at EPA facilitates collaboration within trade associations, and among employers, workers and environmental groups, to establish voluntary toxic reduction priorities for their industries, generate the information needed to develop new production techniques that are cost effective, test and refine these, and disseminate results through national and regional networks. It explicitly seeks to mobilize assets within voluntary associations and to cultivate norms of civic responsibility (Topper 1994; CPN Environment Case Studies 1995). These kinds of programs also provide incentives for national environmental organizations to place greater emphasis on civic and local learning approaches (Roy 1992). Forest rangers have helped citizen groups get organized, and have facilitated informal network building among varied forest use constituencies, in some cases building the basis for a local civic culture on forests in the Northwest that has had much deeper historical roots in the Northeast (Shannon 1989). Middle level civil servants in the Army Corps of Engineers have removed themselves as a party in some disputes to play a faciliatative role in consensus building and technical advice among varied constituencies (Delli Priscoli 1988; Langton 1994). Civil servants have also taken initiative to establish broad networks to foster citizen participation and exchange "best practices," such as the Interagency Council for Citizen Participation in the 1970s, and the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s, and staff from environmental agencies have played a key role in these (Delli Priscoli 1994). Fourth, the development of the capacities of state and local regulatory agencies over the course of the 1970s under great pressure from Washington, and the policy vacuum at the federal level in the early 1980s, permitted "shadow learning communities" (John 1994) among regulators, nonprofits, and businesses to innovate with new civic environmental approaches. Many of the state and local reforms did not have a major civic component, but many others did. They built upon and further reinforced networks of practitioners from civic and environmental organizations at the state and local levels. Fifth, and not least important, the environmental movements of the period have been a vast reservoir for generating social capital. WE do not simply mean dues paying memberships in large environmental and other public interest organizations, which, of course, have grown enormously since the 1960s, and have focused largely on lobbying and litigation. Nor do WE mean participation in grassroots protest organizations as such, which has also grown substantially. Rather, we mean the activist social networks that have focused on problem solving, and developed new forms of local collaboration and civic education. We know of no measures of this more delimited category, though the evidence from innumerable case studies and local reports points clearly towards the conclusion that the past twenty five years has seen a very substantial increase in these kinds of community-based efforts. From our review of cases, as well as the careers of civic practitioners in the environmental arena, several kinds of dynamics stand out: a) local protest organizations often shift emphasis towards building broader networks that can sustain collaborative and voluntary solutions, while maintaining a power base for conflict, if need be. The dynamic here is quite similar to one that has been evident in the field of community organizing, as we shall see below, and it is reinforced when officials and adversaries show a willingness to engage in community dispute resolution, open decision making and the like. An increasing number of citizen environmental guides and dispute resolution techniques build upon the lessons of these kinds of experiences (Crowfoot and Wondolleck 1990; Bidol, Bardwell and Manring 1986; Susskind and Cruikshank 1987); and, b) individual activists, whether they remain with these organizations or not, see their own shift in style to collaborative and trust-building methods as developmental progress, both personally and politically, and a form of learning that is consonant with the values that underlay their initial involvement in the movement and their deeper commitment to participatory democracy. This is often accompanied by their settling into specific communities of place after an earlier period of greater transience. 3 To summarize our argument so far: the very complexity and newness of the problems, the relative weight of top-down regulatory tools and political-legal opportunities at the beginning of the new social regulation, and the very modest capacity to translate existing stocks of social capital from the 1950s and 1960s into environmental problem solving, confronted the United States with a challenge that would inevitably have required an extended period of participatory social learning and capacity building. The mechanisms through which this has occurred over the past quarter of a century have been varied and complex, and in some ways even paradoxical and contradictory. And much remains to be done to develop social capital and civic innovation further, not least in the area of policy design. The measures of this learning and capacity building are rough, to be sure. 4 But on the basis of what we know in several areas—the number and diversity of civic environmental innovations, the extent of local involvement in them, and the policy-oriented learning associated with them—the year 1995 represents a very substantial advance over the year 1970, when the National Environmental Protection Act went into effect. We still face the task of understanding the relationship of this to other measures of the erosion of social capital. But there seems little doubt that we have a much more robust foundation upon which to build in the environmental arena than we did twenty five years ago. Viewing participatory democracy as a learning process has been central to participatory theory, of course. Pateman (1970; see also Barber 1984) stressed the educative potential of participation to help form engaged citizens with progressively refined attitudes and skills needed to sustain democracy. Mansbridge (1980) enriched this approach enormously by theorizing unitary and adversary democratic processes in the context of specific participatory communities' understandings of their practice and their capacities to reflect and learn. Sirianni (1993a, 1993b) extended this further by examining how participatory democracy within the feminist movement and various women's organizations and networks over the past three decades has prompted a sustained process of critical self-reflection that might be characterized as "learning pluralism," in which many of the problematic aspects, as well as new challenges, of participatory democracy have been confronted practically, and with a sensibility that is consistent with much of contemporary democratic theory. The environmental arena provides an example of how participatory democracy within the public lobby regulatory regime, with its complex constellation of formal rights and regulatory actors, has spurred civic capacity building and social capital formation. Community Organizing & Development In the arena of community organizing and community development, there has also been very substantial learning and capacity building over the past thirty years. In early 1964, the OEO community action program had not yet been devised, and only a few experiments in the Ford Foundation's "gray areas" program existed. Alinsky organizing projects were alive and well in only a handful of cities, and their philosophy and techniques were crude by today's standards in the Industrial Areas Foundation. Very few community development corporations existed, and support from city governments for community-based development was virtually nil. Neighborhood participation in local government was channeled through party ward bosses. Today, by contrast, there are several thousand community development corporations across the country, and as many as 6000 other community organizations. Congregation-based organizing that derives from Alinsky has many durable and influential projects, refined leadership development and capacities for collaboration with government and business, four major networks, and is growing steadily. And other modifications of the Alinsky model have substantial membership, influence, and training capacities. There are far more multiracial community organizations and community development projects than ever before. Extensive national support networks exist for community-based development, as well as a good number of state- and city-wide networks. Many cities have expanded their capacities for community development and recruited innovative leaders of community organizations to staff housing, planning and other agencies. And some cities have developed formal systems of neighborhood associations where citizen participation is robust. The capacity of community-based organizations to engage in complex public-private partnerships, and the availability of workable models for this, are far greater than in the 1960s, and have been increasing steadily. As Paul Brophy (1993: 223) argues, "far more capacity exists at the neighborhood level to effect change than ever before." Yet, by other measures, social capital has clearly been depleted (Putnam 1995). The black middle class deserted urban ghettos once economic opportunities improved and housing discrimination barriers were lowered, thus thinning out cross-class networks and community assets. Capital flight, postindustrial development, and federal housing policy contributed to further isolation and concentration of the urban poor (Wilson 1987). The dispersion of second- and third-generation ethnics in many cities, as well as the decline of local union halls, party clubs, and women's clubs, has further depleted urban social capital. How might we make sense of these developments as part of a complex historical dynamic in which substantial learning and capacity building has taken place since the 1960s amidst many broader indicators of decline? First, the complexity of problems, and even their newness on certain dimensions, as well as the structure of political opportunities and obstacles in the 1960s, did not bode well either for maintaining many existing forms of social capital, or for developing policies that would help build new forms. Community-based development strategies in urban ghettoes could probably not have been expected to build primarily upon the cross-class networks that were held in place by previous policies excluding middle class blacks from moving outwards. The changing nature of manufacturing and the gradual shift to postindustrial and globalist patterns of development were not well understood at the time nor much amenable to existing policy tools or grassroots strategies. Cross-race network building was impeded by some of the very forms of social capital that did exist in white working class communities: skilled trade union and craft communities, ethnic and neighborhood associations (Quadagno 1994). Reform elites both at the national level and within the civil rights movement were overwhelmingly oriented towards civil rights and equal opportunity strategies that paid little direct attention to issues of social capital within urban black communities, and arguably had the consequence of depleting existing stocks further in white working class communities through busing and white flight. In addition, dominant rights and opportunity strategies further fueled the expansion of a therapeutic welfare state where black and white professionals alike have refined practices that erode the fabric of community support networks and local knowledge (Polsky 1992; McKnight 1995; Stone 1993), even though there have been some important countertendencies to this (Simon 1994; Gilkes 1986). Furthermore, the one major federal policy in the 1960s that did mobilize participation and begin a long process of building new forms of social capital in the cities, namely Community Action, was overloaded with the tasks of securing black political empowerment in urban politics, de-racializing the New Deal welfare state, and completing the democratic revolution in the United States (Greenstone and Peterson 1973; Quadagno 1994). The already daunting challenges of building new forms of organization that could involve grassroots members, mobilize community assets and self help, develop program capacities, and collaborate with city and social welfare agencies, were thus made ever more difficult. Community action agencies were caught up in the struggles of the broader civil rights movement, conflicts with mayors and social service agencies, and in the polarized national politics of race. These largely eclipsed in both public and scholarly opinion (Moynihan 1969; Greenstone and Peterson 1973) the process of social learning and capacity building that had begun. Nor were the major political ideologies much prepared to appreciate this either. Conservatives had yet to develop a major emphasis on civic capacities and mediating institutions (Berger and Neuhaus 1976). Liberals focused on civil rights, equal opportunities and political empowerment. Radicals appreciated local participation, but their worry about co-optation tended to belittle self help and obscure the development of collaborative problem solving and trust building strategies of a more mundane variety (Piven and Cloward 1977; Katznelson 1980). In short, the knowledge base for policies that could promote the development of social capital and community problem solving in cities faced with many new challenges was poorly developed. Ideological framings obscured much, and political conflicts captured still more of the local efforts to build community capacities. Whether other realistic policy options at the time might have altered this balance in favor of a more robust development of social capital in white working class and minority urban communities alike, and still have been able to secure the basic democratic gains of the civil rights revolution, is a question open to dispute, of course. WE do not see any obviously available alternatives—or richly civic alternative framings—at the time that might have helped establish a different course, though there were important participatory voices that dissented from the liberal emphasis on housing integration (Piven and Cloward 1966, 1967). However, WE do see evidence of substantial learning and capacity building that emerged as a result of, and in response to, the policy options that were pursued. This brings us to our second point. Federal support for Community Action, and a variety of other programs that grew up around it, was a very important factor in spurring the development of new forms of social capital. For all its problems and controversy, Community Action turned out to be a vast incubator for involving new community actors, providing participatory skills, spurring local self help, building local associations, forging broader networks, and laying the foundations for new forms of collaboration between local groups and city and service agencies. Much of this took place more slowly and less visibly than the dramatic political impacts, and followed upon initial stages of conflict and confrontation. But it should hardly be surprising that it did begin to happen. "Maximum feasible participation," however obscure its exact origins or controversial its subsequent interpretations, reflected the realistic assumption of policy makers that the civil rights movement had made it impossible to have an antipoverty program without the direct participation of the poor and local organizations representing them (Marris and Rein 1982: 260, 269). President Johnson himself, and other key figures, conceived Community Action as part of the long tradition of New England town meetings, local self determination, and voluntary self help (Berry, Portney and Thomson 1993: 26). And whatever went on in the political battles surrounding the programs, poor people demonstrated time and again that they were primarily interested in solving problems in their communities and in their families (Kramer 1969). Viewed from the level of city politics in the late 1960s, Community Action may appear to have often been captured by the civil rights movement and caught up in the dynamics of political struggle (Quadagno 1994). But at the grassroots level it was almost always much more than this. Third, the mechanisms through which capacities have developed in the wake of the Community Action programs of the 1960s are varied and complex. For many, participation on CAP boards and neighborhood councils was an important educative experience that provided skills in running meetings, collaborating with other community based organizations, and mobilizing neighbors to get involved. It nurtured and broadened their community caretaking skills and self help efforts. Service on a CAP board tended to expand organizational participation in the community, and this seems true of other programs that were part of, or existed alongside of, Community Action, such as Head Start and community health centers (Zigler and Muenchow 1992; Davis and Schoen 1978). Leadership training was an implicit, and sometimes an explicit goal, and thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of new community leaders emerged. Neighborhood women had relatively equal access to board positions that were allocated to the community, and filled a disproportionate number of staff positions in neighborhood centers. Leadership networks were strengthened, and CAP activity often provided a framework for organizational collaboration in the black community when other parts of the movement were undergoing severe fragmentation (Marshall 1971; Kramer 1969; Austin 1972). The ferment of self help and community leadership development in and around Community Action helped to spur independent capacity building projects. The Center for Community Change, for instance, which has helped thousands of community-based organizations since its founding in 1967, brought together practitioners from community action, unions, civil rights groups, and the Kennedy family under the initial leadership of Richard Boone, the individual most directly responsible for the federal "maximum feasible participation" language in Community Action (Boone 1972; Center for Community Change 1992; Eisenberg 1994). The Ford Foundation financed this and other community development and self help support networks in subsequent years, such as the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Institute for Community Economics, both of which have sustained the development of community building projects in the decades since. The growth of community development corporations (CDCs), as well as still other training and support networks, accelerated in the latter half of the 1970s as the neighborhood movements gathered steam, and various kinds of federal supports were put in place, including funding mechanisms (Community Development Block Grants), technical services (Community Services Administration, Office of Neighborhood Development), and legal remedies (Community Reinvestment Act). Thus, in the initial decade of 1965-1975, perhaps one hundred CDCs, emerged, but in the latter half of the 1970s another one thousand or so were created that were leaner and more diverse, and linked to the broader neighborhood revitalization movement. When Reagan administration cutbacks occurred, the CDC movement's capacities had reached a critical mass that allowed it to further refine its strategies and develop much richer institutional supports, including with banks and corporations, and another several thousand CDCs emerged over the course of the 1980s (Pierce and Steinbach 1987; Perry 1987; Vidal 1992; Zdanek 1987). City governments provided another arena in which skills and capacities could be further developed. Several of the cities with the most vibrant formal systems of neighborhood government in the U.S. built these upon the foundations of Community Action and Model Cities programs in the 1970s , even as they moved far beyond these early programs (Berry, Portney and Thomson 1993; Thomson 1995). The neighborhood movement of the 1970s created a new constituency base for mayors and urban coalitions oriented more towards community development, and networks of leaders from community-based organizations entered many levels of city government, especially housing, planning and development offices (Mollenkopf 1983; Krumholz and Forester 1990), where they have continued to focus on community capacity-building strategies. The annual All-American Cities Awards, which are organized by the National Civic League and put increasing stress on building civic and community capacities and grassroots participation, show that this process has, if anything, accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s (Sirianni 1995). The capacities for multisided collaboration among city governments, community groups, and business leadership groups has expanded enormously over a three-decade period, and recent "comprehensive neighborhood-based community-empowerment initiatives" (Eisen 1992; Brophy 1993) have brought new emphasis to developing neighborhood leadership capacities, which have often been neglected as a result of the professionalization of community development roles and funding constraints. And while it is too early to evaluate the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities programs of HUD under the Clinton administration, these and related funding approaches have emphasized more than ever before community assets mobilization (Kretzman and McKnight 1993) and strategic planning to build networks across a broad range of community-based organizational actors. Fourth, within the arena of independent community organizing, there has also been very substantial learning and capacity building over the past three decades. The number of independent community organizations has grown considerably, and currently stands at around 6000 nationwide (Delgado 1994). Religious funding for all types of community organizing projects has increased substantially over the past two-decades, and congregation-based projects have shown a particular vitality (McCarthy and Castelli 1994). Interfaith organizations build new forms of social capital across religious, neighborhood and, increasingly, racial boundaries (Boyte 1989; MacDougal 1993; Warren 1995). The Industrial Areas Foundation, the leading network of of Alinsky-style congregation-based projects, has grown steadily, and three newer networks (the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing, or PICO; the Gamiliel Foundation; and the Direct Action and Research Training Center, or DART) have developed in recent years. All of these provide increasingly extensive training and mentoring for grassroots leaders, with a special emphasis on relational organizing, with the IAF setting the pace and enriching the Alinsky tradition with a language of public life and public leadership development, rather than instrumental interest mobilization (Boyte 1989; Rogers 1990; Karapin 1994; Cortes 1993). Innovations travel increasingly among these networks, despite limited formal collaboration. And this is also true within the broader field of community organizing through the influence of ACORN, the Center for Community Change, the Center for Third World Organizing and other training centers (Delgado 1986; McCarthy and Castelli 1994). Independent community organizations have also demonstrated increasing capacities to collaborate with a complex array of other actors in city governments, banks, insurance companies, and other institutions, even while preserving a power base for protest and direct action, and negotiating for an expanded role for neighborhood leadership development within broader partnerships (Lange 1994; Cortes 1993; MacDougal 1993; McCarthy and Castelli 1994; Medoff and Sklar 1994). There is a striking contrast here between the 1960s and early 1970s community organizing and recent projects, even though the tendency to collaborate and assume the role of responsible partner was strong from the beginning (Lancourt 1978). Although we know of no quantitative measure, it seems quite clear from case studies and general surveys of community organizing that neighborhood leaders and organizers have developed more diverse networks and trust-building strategies with a broader range of institutional leaders in the community over the course of the past two decades. Given the complexity of the problems and the need for increasingly collaborative and comprehensive approaches, this seems to have been an important form of social capital building during this period. Some Concluding Thoughts The study of the specific dynamics of social capital formation and depletion, as well as the role of these in underpinning effective democratic governance in the contemporary period, is still in its early stages. Our own review of these two cases reminds us continually of how much more we could use to know about what has been occurring within each of them. As we move forward in trying to enrich the social capital perspective, WE would emphasize several things. First, the period from the 1960s to the present has clearly been a complex one regarding the development and depletion of social capital. If indicators of net gains and losses are quite revealing, it is important to focus as well on the specific arenas in which civic capacity has been built over an extended period of time, and on the mechanisms through which this has occurred. After all, this is the most promising foundation upon which we are likely to be able to build in the coming years, even if we clearly need to further refine our capacity-building approaches, invent new ones, and develop much better policy supports in these and other arenas, such as working time (Sirianni 1991; Schorr 1992; Sirianni and Walsh 1995). The 1960s "participatory revolution" has had complex and often paradoxical impacts on participation itself, to be sure (Dionne 1991; Huntington 1980). But it also signaled the beginning of an extended period of social learning and capacity building that has been quite impressive. Viewed from the perspective of the development and refinement of new civic models, support networks, practitioner skills, legal opportunities, and—at least in some areas such as the environment—quantitative increases in civic participation—the glass is half full. Viewed from the perspective of the complexity of problems to be solved, net indicators of overall depletion of social capital, and the capacity of our other institutions (parties, interest groups, media, legislatures etc.) to reinvent themselves in such a way as to foster collaborative problem solving and deliberative democratic approaches, the glass seems half empty, and perhaps draining quickly. How we choose to view this is partly a question of scholarly analysis, where we will continue to debate the relative importance of different factors and policy alternatives. But it is also partly a question of the choice of political metaphor. It is our hope that the metaphor of "bowling alone" does not eclipse the metaphor of citizens "working together," which seems equally important as a discursive resource that can enhance our capacities to learn and act. Secondly, in thinking about social capital development and depletion, it is important that we pay increasing attention to the specific characteristics of problem areas, what makes them increasingly complex and challenging, and what specific kinds of social capital stocks might be drawn upon in addressing them. As the cases of civic environmentalism and community development show, we cannot assume that preexisting stocks of social capital could have served as an adequate foundation for building capacities in new and more complex problem arenas, even if some of them might have been more effectively preserved and utilized. We think that this is also the case in areas such as health and aging, and no doubt others as well. Thus, as we think about general measures, and even some policy options with potentially broad impacts (community service, working time alternatives), we need to continually bring these down to the level of problem specificity. Thirdly, to build the kinds of social capital that can permit us to more effectively address highly complex social problems with an increasingly complex array of social actors will require greater capacities for participatory learning and assessment within many institutional arenas. Much learning has occurred over the past three decades, but developing capacities for reflective civic practice needs to become further refined, systematic and widespread. Improved scholarly assessment tools are important, but emphasis should be on much more on developing collaborative learning communities within organizations and policy arenas themselves, including state agencies, legislatures, interest groups, media, and civic organizations (Sirianni, Boyte, delli Priscoli, and Barber 1994; Sirianni, Friedland and Schuler 1994). If the problems associated with the elderly and health (including the financing of these) are to be addressed creatively in the coming years, then organizations like AARP will have to learn how to build the civic capacities of its 33 million members, and direct these increasingly towards self help, intergenerational community projects, and health values dialogue, as some within the organization have been urging, and less toward merely lobbying as a special interest group for benefits and entitlements. If legislatures are to develop effective policies with enhanced public legitimacy in areas with divided constituencies and difficult tradeoffs, then they will increasingly have to learn how to complement their own deliberative and representative functions with an array of community dialogue, visioning and dispute resolution practices, as has happened in the Oregon health plan and an increasing number of environmental policy dialogues. These kinds of challenges, which meet innumerable barriers within institutions, will require much enhanced capacities for exchanging best civic practices, evaluating civic impacts, and informing policy debates. The past three decades of participatory learning have created a substantial foundation upon which to build. 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"Commuity Development Corporations." In Bruyn, Severyn and James Meehan, eds. Beyond the Market and the State: New Directions in Community Development. Philadelphia, Temple University Press. Ziegler, Edward and Susan Muenchow. 1992. Head Start. New York: Basic Books. 1 This research on participatory innovation from the 1960s to the 1990s is part of a larger work, co-authored with Lewis Friedland, Participatory Democracy and Civic Innovation in America, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Some of our interviews were conducted as part of the Reinventing Citizenship Project, funded by the Ford Foundation, and of the American Civic Forum. Sirianni has served as research director for both of these, and is a member of the "community stories" team of the Alliance for National Renewal. Sirianni and Friedland currently serve, respectively, as editor-in-chief and research director of the Civic Practices Network (CPN), which is a collaborative project of many civic organizations and practitioners that supports the development and exchange of case studies, best practices, training materials, assessment tools, as well as general essays and analyses. CPN is available on the World Wide Web at http://cpn.journalism.wisc.edu. 2 A favorite recent example: at a strategy meeting convened shortly after the defeat of the Clinton health plan and the Congressional elections of 1994, the leaders of two public interest groups prominent in the reform argued for increasing their "victim banks," i.e. their fund of stories of victimization within the health system, which Hillary Rodham Clinton and the press had drawn upon during the previous year. To the suggestion from another advocacy group that they pool their victim stories, they argued that each of their organizations needed their own separate victim banks to give them political clout and press access. To the suggestion from a national civic group that the language of victimization might itself be disempowering for the kind of community dialogue and capacity building needed for reform, they responded with incomprehension bordering on hostility (Sirianni meeting notes, Washington, D.C., November 22, 1994). 3 This parallels a more general finding from our interviews, though viewed from a different angle: a very substantial proportion of leading civic practitioners describe their careers in terms of this learning dynamic, which they identify in terms of personal maturation, political effectiveness, and a more fully consistent commitment to participatory democracy which inspired their initial activism in the 1960s and 1970s. A former grassroots anti-rape and anti-nuclear activist heads a major state and national network that seeks deliberative and collaborative solutions on health care, and manages an overwhelmingly conservative board of directors at the state level to get broad public support for this. A former regional director of Students for a Democratic Society and rank-and-file organizer in the steel industry heads a federal agency project to build industry and community partnerships to reduce environmental hazards. A long-time feminist organizer heads a community dialogue project on gays and lesbians in the school curriculum intended to produce positive collaboration on broader school reform, and complains ruefully that those whose values she most shares are not nearly as polite and attentive to their adversaries as the fundamentalist Christians on the other side of the issue. 4 John (1994) utilizes two indexes: the Renew America Environmental Success Index, and the Green Index. I have reviewed case studies in specific policy areas that give an indication of policy-oriented learning, and have interviewed civic practitioners embedded within broader networks. I do not know of an existing quantitative measure of level of participation in local environmental problem solving, as distinct from protest, however, or the dynamic between these over time. |
