Social networks facilitate access to resources and protect the commons, whilst co-operation makes markets work more efficiently.
There is potential that the concept can help to bring women's unpaid 'community and household labour',[3] vital to survival and development, to the attention of economists.
Assuming that social capital is inherently good overlooks hierarchies, power dynamics and difference within 'communities' and groups, and that norms can be downward levelling as well as supportive.
Rather than being trapped in a paradigm that feminists have sought to problematise, gendered critiques of value and the economy would do better to draw on the work of Foucault than Bourdieu (Adkins 2005), or focus on economic diversity rather than how social capital supports capital-centric development (Gibson Graham 1996).
However, given the prominence of social capital on the development agenda and the plethora of policy and academic work that refers to the term, it seems vital that the gendered dimensions of the debate be highlighted.