Well as Income

A Useful Tool for Public Policy? Social capital is a concept with much promise, but an uncertain future. On the one hand, the basic intuition behind it makes sense: our social relations can be an important source of resources and supports. Public policy researchers and practitioners have been keenly interested in social capital precisely because of its promise to provide a means to better identify and understand just how these resources and supports are invested in and developed, how they are accessed, and what kind of benefits flow from them. If we can better understand this process we might, in turn, better harness its potential in realizing any number of public policy objectives. On the other hand, though recent years have witnessed worldwide interest in social capital’s public policy potential, its usefulness for policy and program devel-opment has yet to be fully realized. Much of the blame for the present inability to translate the concept into policy settings lies with the conceptual confusio