Nigeria: The Role of Social Capital,

Sustainable development as an aspiration is global; as an ongoing process, it is local. A growing number of scientists and technologists share in the aspiration and experiment with the local. Here we report one such effort in Ijebu-Ode, a small city of 200,000 inhabitants in south-west Nigeria, which, by way of a participatory city consultation process chose to reduce poverty through a set of local and sustainable livelihood activities. Now five years into the effort, we describe the setting, the participatory process, the poverty reduction activities, and the impressive results to date. We attribute success to the large stock of social capital, the participatory process that drew upon this stock, and the scientific and technological community that both serve as boundary spanners to link Ijebu-Ode to the national and the global and as