Introduction

Hulme (2000) suggests that the concept of social capital ‘has provided an opportunity to move beyond the confines of participation and to address broader issues of values and institutions’ (p. 6). This book has, however, argued that social capital building does not automatically improve the livelihoods of poor people. It has offered evidence to explain that the neo-institutional approach to social capital is inadequate for understanding three key aspects: individual motivation in utilising social capital, the institutional dynamics that makes institutional crafting problematic, and the structural complexity that enables some poor people to gain access to social capital while denying others.

In order to accommodate the non-economic motivations for collective action and the idea that social perceptions of reality are relative and plural, this book has stressed that the need for a better framework to conceptualise social relationships and collective action. In this final chapter, I will first re-emphasise the significance of the ‘pro-poor’ social capital perspective by identifying some ‘gaps’ between the mainstream institutional designs and actual social realities. I will then analyse the notion of ‘unseen’ social capital, regarding its nature, characteristics and its differences from ‘seen’ social capital. The concluding section will highlight policy implications that policy makers and practitioners can deduce from this research.

Understanding the ‘pro-poor’ social capital perspective

This book has called for the building of an alternative social capital perspective with a poverty specificity. The sense of urgency arises from the context that, while the ‘Design Principles’ seek to re-engineer social relations by institutional crafting and achieve beneficial collective action by contractual engagement and authority building, and have become increasingly popular at the policy level, the effectiveness of the proposed prescriptions in enhancing poor people's livelihoods remains doubtful.

After closely scrutinising many individual lives and social interactions among migrants and local people in the three NGO groups in Hong Kong, this study has exposed a gap between the assurances made in the ‘Design Principles’, on the one hand, and the real impact on the ground, on the other. This book has demonstrated that imposing the threat of sanctions to motivate less-active members in the female migrant mutual-help group is not necessarily effective in fostering norms of mutual trust and co-operation in groups.