Social Capital Networks for Achieving Sustainable Development

Local Environment The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability

ISSN: 1354-9839 (Print) 1469-6711 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cloe20

Social capital networks for achieving sustainable development Emiko Kusakabe To cite this article: Emiko Kusakabe (2012) Social capital networks for achieving sustainable development, Local Environment, 17:10, 1043-1062, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2012.714756 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.714756

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Local Environment Vol. 17, No. 10, November 2012, 1043 –1062

Social capital networks for achieving sustainable development Emiko Kusakabe∗

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Department of Research and Planning, Open City Foundation, London, UK There have been few empirical studies investigating whether and how social capital (SC) relates to better achievement of sustainability goals and, if so, how. This research investigates the roles three types of SC, namely, bonding, bridging, and bracing SC, play in achieving sustainable development (SD), using a case study of the Japanese region to explore the process of SC accumulation leading to collective action. The research question as to whether SC accumulation makes a difference in the progress towards sustainability is addressed qualitatively and quantitatively using a case study, and network and regression analysis; in particular the impact and functions of bracing SC are closely investigated. The study concludes that SC accumulation can indeed make a difference in achieving sustainability and that bracing SC plays an essential role in expediting the processes of goal sharing and resource flow by connecting various networks across sectors and scales, thereby making collective action possible.

These findings suggest that creating an environment in which the generation of all three types of SC is encouraged may help local governments to achieve their desired policy goals for SD. Keywords: sustainable development; social capital; collective action; network analysis

Introduction and conceptual approach A social capital (SC) approach provides a theory to explain micro-level mobilisation for achieving sustainability, explicating the interaction between individuals in the process and the interdependence and integration of individuals and groups required for unity and continuity of collective action. Like other countries, Japan too has undergone periods of citizen mobilisation in social movements since the 1960s, over the past few decades many parts of Japan have seen citizen mobilisation in the form of sustainable area/ community making (machizukuri).

After the first stage of social movements in Japan, which were mainly anti-pollution protest movements, urban middle-class dwellers began to organise themselves from the mid-1970s to prevent pollution and protect the environment with a focus on their own lifestyle (Hasegawa 2004, p. 41). These second-stage social movements in Japan displayed surprisingly similar characteristics to the new social movements (NSMs) that have occurred since the mid-1960s in the western world, and are claimed to be significantly different from the conventional ones, in particular in that they target the social domain of “civil ∗

Emails: emiko@opencityportal.net, e.kusakabe@ucl.ac.uk

ISSN 1354-9839 print/ISSN 1469-6711 online # 2012 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.

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society” rather than the economy or the state, raising issues concerning the democratisation of structures of everyday life, and focusing on forms of communication and collective identity (Cohen 1985, p. 667). Offe (1985, pp. 828– 830) describes NSMs as actors locating themselves between state and civil society, with their issue focus on lifeworld, a high value placed on autonomy and self-help, and a context-sensitive informal mode of action. The 1980s – 1990s in Japan was a period that can be explained in terms of Beck’s (1992) “Risk Society”, which describes the condition of uncertainty where new risks to society are continually being generated by the application of specialised knowledge and technology whose consequences can always only be partially understood and by a whole series of interrelated changes within contemporary social life. Incidents such as the discovery of carcinogenic dioxin in emissions from trash incineration in 1983, the Monju nuclear reactor sodium leak in 1995, and at the Tokaimura nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in 1999 created a sense of risk among the public, together with shifting employment patterns and heightened job insecurity caused by the bursting of the economic bubble from around 1990. Giddens (2006, p. 869) sees the growth of NSMs as evidence of a belief among citizens that direct action and participation is more useful than reliance on politicians and political systems, and he notes “more than ever before people are supporting social movements as a way of highlighting complex moral issues and putting them at the centre of social life”. This was how Japanese people too felt and reacted in those days. They considered how they could cope with the situation, and began to exchange information with other individuals who shared the same concerns, and to take action collectively to protect the living environment of their communities. Giddens (2006, p. 123) argues that living in an information age means an increase in “social reflexivity”, which refers to the fact that we now have to constantly contemplate the circumstances in which we live our lives, in contrast to the days when societies were more geared to custom and tradition, and people could follow established ways of doing things in an unreflective fashion. The second half of the 1990s was dominated by two natural/man-made disasters, first the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, which killed 6500 people and prompted 1.5 million volunteers to gather from inside and outside the country to help in the recovery efforts, and then the Russian tanker Nakhodka’s 19-million-litre heavy oil spill in 1997, which thousands of volunteers (280,000 man-days) gathered to help clean up, the 1990s was an era of natural and man-made disasters. The year 1995 was thereafter dubbed by the Japanese media as “Volunteering’s First Year” – remarking on the nationwide rise of volunteerism in the western sense in a country where previously it had been relatively rare. The sense of uncertainty and risk has come to the fore once more since 11 March 2012 following the failure of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in the wake of the Great Tohoku Earthquake. This disaster brought together 900,000 volunteers from inside and outside of Japan in spite of the difficult and confused conditions in the affected areas.

Mol and Spaargaren (1993, p. 447) held that “reflexive modernity provides a conceptual tool to analyse the ‘countervailing power’ that agents possess and develop when anthropological shocks occur”: for example, “deskilling is met with reskilling, and loss of power can induce processes of re-empowerment”. These Japanese experiences parallel the relationship between structural dynamics and the agency of movements, which Miller (2006, p. 207) points out as an important feature of NSMs. While NSM theory explains the overall macrolevel picture of citizen mobilisation, it does not analyse mobilisation at the micro-level, that is, the process of interaction between individuals which leads to the generation of collective action. For this the theory of SC is helpful, especially in the way it explains how social action makes micro-to-macro transitions as collective action (Coleman 1988).

The idea of SC was developed in the 1980s by two writers of very different theoretical persuasions, the first being the French cultural theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, and the other, James S. Coleman (Harris 2002, p. 119). Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992, p. 119) define

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SC as the resources that individuals or groups gain “by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition”. For Bourdieu (1972), SC is one of four forms of “capital” along with economic, cultural, and symbolic capital that characterise class position; being in possession of one type of capital can help in the pursuit of others. Bourdieu’s view is that a social structure is generated over time by individuals in a community, and the pattern of their action and thinking is not necessarily controlled by utility-maximising behaviour, but is formed also by the mundane communal conduct of daily life, which itself has been shaped through their social processes over the years, embodied as “habitus”. Within the structure or governance of habitus, individuals or groups try to increase their capital. The role that SC plays is in providing access to networks in higher strata and increasing their actual or potential capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, pp. 120– 121). Coleman (1988, p. S98) also sees SC as one of four types of capital, with the other three being physical, financial, and human capital. He defines SC as “capital created by individuals in the structure of relations between and among persons to find better ways of making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible”. In order to explain his theoretical orientation, Coleman (1988, p. S96) points out the defects of two intellectual streams in their explanations of social action. The sociological stream does not consider the “engine of action” of the actor, as the line of thought claims that the actor is shaped by the environment. Meanwhile the economic stream does not give any credence to the view that in the real world a person’s actions tend to be constrained by the social context. Stating that “social capital comes about through changes in the relations among persons that facilitate action”, Coleman (1988, p. S100) regards SC as being not something automatically produced by persons in their interactions, but as a resource produced from the transformed relations of individuals who are taking action to achieve certain aims. It follows that we can recognise the accumulation of this capital among persons by looking at their “achievement of some ends”. The similarities between the views of Bourdieu and Coleman in relation to SC are that both saw it functioning within the structure of relations and yet recognised that human action is not totally controlled by the structure nor totally controlled by utility-maximising rational choice. There is however a difference in that Coleman sees the public-good nature of SC, and that it facilitates collective action, while Bourdieu does not acknowledge this. Bourdieu’s emphasis in regard to the effects of SC is on individuals facilitating their access to people in higher social layers, rather than on groups or communities facilitating their action to overcome collective action problems or achieve collective goals. Ostrom’s (1995, p. 131) definition on SC is close to Coleman’s but she sees an essential role of SC in controlling rational-choice-oriented human nature; unless there are good incentive systems that generate higher levels of benefits for those who agree to participate in such ventures, individuals may easily follow merely short-term rational-choice strategies (Ostrom 1990). With regard to the forms SC takes, Ostrom (1999, p. 176) notes the shared knowledge, understanding, norms, rules, and expectations about patterns of interactions that groups of individuals bring to a recurrent activity. Ostrom (1999, p. 172) observes that although SC is hard to construct through external interventions and that national and regional governmental institutions strongly affect the level and type of SC available to individuals in pursuing development efforts, individuals develop their own SC in the form of the rules used by self-governing communities. What is interesting about Ostrom’s view is that bonding networks of self-governing communities are made up of individuals who are learning agents, making individual decisions on a day-to-day basis, and that they bear the consequences of actions, thus reaching collectively the final form of sustainable communal management as the optimum form, under the given conditions, for them to maximise utility. Ostrom’s observation of the community management

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of citizens who have shared it for a substantial time is informative in that it gives a vivid picture of how norms actually work in the day-to-day interaction of community citizens and of how collective action becomes possible. Ostrom’s self-governing community management model sounds ideal for achieving local sustainability, with decision-making conducted in a participatory manner. However, the current mobile lifestyle of people does not make it possible to achieve long-standing self-governing communities, where norms work due to “closure of social networks” (Coleman 1988). In a contemporary highly mobile world, we need a different SC model in which we can make the most of such capital, especially its potential role as an agent of change (Falk and Kilpatrick 2000).

There are two types of SC networks identified by most writers on the subject. Putnam (2000, p. 22) describes the first type, “bonding SC”, as being among similar types of persons (class, ethnicity, background, interests), whose networks reinforce exclusive identities and solidarity; and the second type, “bridging SC”, as being between non-similar groups, or “people unlike ourselves”, thereby extending linkages to external assets and information diffusion. However, negative effects have also been noted by many observers.

Recent studies have identified at least four negative consequences of SC: exclusion of outsiders, excessive claims on group members, restriction on individual freedoms, and downward levelling norms (Portes 1998, p. 15). For example, the norms that help to maintain stability can also reduce innovativeness. All these four negative traits seem to be related, however, to bonding SC, rather than the bridging type. Granovetter (1973) highlighted in The strength of weak ties the roles loose bridging networks could play in the flow of new ideas and information within complex social systems. Storper (2005, p. 33) holds that “Putnam’s bonding operationalises the classical notion of community, and bridging that of society”, in other words, gemeinschaft (community) and gesellschaft (society), and claims that these two forces act as mutual checks and balances on their potentially negative effects, while allowing the positive contributions of each to economic efficiency.

Indeed, there is a weakness in bridging networks, too. Falleth (2006, p. 68), looking at collective management in a 2600 km2 protected area in Norway, points out a weakness of bridging: it is “very challenging to mobilise collective action through bridging networks, not least because relationships among actors are influenced by divergent and even conflicting institutional settings”. If sustainable development (SD) is to be achieved, however, action for sustainability needs to be taken widely – crossing over community boundaries – and for that, the roles played by bridging networks need to be combined with bonding networks’ solidarity, thus echoing Storper’s (2005) argument.

In order to close the conceptual gap in describing the cross-sectoral, cross-scale horizontal and vertical linkages that are involved in many partnerships, Rydin and Holman (2004, p. 122) proposed a third type, “bracing SC”, which in fact “braces” the linkages of bonding and bridging networks. In differentiating the three types they considered the scale at which SC operates, the boundaries involved, the role of place and territory, the nature of the linkages present, and the kind of actors involved and the sectors where they operate. Compared to bonding capital, bracing capital may be “more strategic and less all-embracing”, while it has “more common norms and values” – compared to bridging capital. The type of linkage involved is horizontal for bonding and bridging capital, and vertical and horizontal for bracing capital. An important role played by the vertical dimension of SC was pointed out by Woolcock (2001) as “linking SC” when the World Bank engaged in SD in developing countries; people working in agencies and institutions play an essential role in engaging with local communities. The notion of linking SC is defined as “connections with people in power, whether they are in politically or financially influential positions” (Woolcock and Sweetser 2002, p. 26) and is “characterized by connections

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between those within a hierarchy where there are differing levels of power” (Harper 2002, p. 3). Compared to linking SC, the notion of bracing SC suggests connections between people who have ties with various groups – formal or informal, across sectors, across government levels, or localities. Each individual in a bracing network is connected on the basis of a trust relationship that acknowledges others’ ability and efficiency in putting across messages to various networks, and the existence of a bracing SC network in a region implies a great potential for mobilising many people in various networks for sustainable regional community building. Bracing SC, which “operates within a limited number of individuals to scaffold network connections vertically as well as horizontally”, can “get change to happen” and a mix of the three types of SC helps to achieve the desired policy goal (Rydin and Holman 2004, p. 125).

Drawing on this thinking, this research aims to investigate qualitatively and quantitatively the existence and the functions of these three types of SC using a case study from the Shiga region’s “sustainable area” building over the past 40 years. The hypothesis for this investigation was: SC accumulation makes a difference in the progress towards sustainability. It was examined using interviews, document analysis, a questionnaire survey, regression analysis, and network analysis. In the next section the process of SC accumulation, especially the role played by bracing SC, is examined through a qualitative investigation of activities for sustainability in Shiga over the last four decades. This is followed by a quantitative investigation of the relationship between SC and sustainability achievement.

SC and the Soap Movement in Shiga, Japan Shiga Prefecture (county), situated immediately northwest of Kyoto Prefecture, has an area of 4017 km2 and a population of 1.4 million. There were two reasons for selecting this prefecture. First, a 5 million-year-old ecosystem, Lake Biwa (Horie 1984 cited in Nakanishi and Sekino 1996), occupying one-sixth of the prefecture, is integral to the life of Shiga people as a vital water resource, and there is a distinctive culture of awe and respect for the Lake. I therefore presumed that there must have existed some kind of systems or networks that act to preserve the culture. Second, Shiga is widely known as the place where the “Soap Movement” (which advocated the use of soap for washing clothes and dishes) arose in 1977 when a “red tide” (an algal bloom that can be poisonous to aquatic animals and humans) occurred in Lake Biwa. As citizens participating in this movement learned more about the causes of the problem, and came to reflect upon their lifestyle with its extensive use of synthetic detergents, the Soap Movement gained strength, and as a result facilitated the enactment of an ordinance by the prefectural government prohibiting the sale and use of synthetic detergents containing phosphate. This in turn influenced the national policy on water quality management. Within the Soap Movement, collective action occurred in various stages. The key to achieving collective action in terms of co-working, joint strategy development, and eventual changes in resource use is, according to Rydin (2006, p. 213), to “generate networking activity that releases resources, develops a common knowledge base and problem frame, and builds up norms of trust”, where “key individuals act collectively to generate virtuous cycles within the networking process and bring about a flow of resources (financial, regulatory powers, etc.)”. Drawing on these ideas, I analysed the process of SC accumulation in the development of the Soap Movement in Shiga, and examined the extent to which Rydin’s (2006) observation applies to this Japanese case. I produced Figure 1 by examining the SC flow leading to the collective action. The story of the development of the Soap Movement is based on Ito and Ide (2009). In this analysis, the forms taken by SC were premised to be the ones proposed

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Figure 1.

The dynamics of SC accumulation leading to collective action.

by Coleman (1988): obligation and expectations (reciprocity); information-flow capability of social structure; and norms accompanied by sanctions in the structure of relations between actors. The terms in the figure are ones used by Rydin (2006, p. 207) in explaining the key to achieving collective action. Bold plain shows the types of SC operating at different stages starting from the bottom and italics indicate their functions. The story of the Soap Movement based on Figure 1 is as follows: Knowledge about the incidence of diaper rash and eczema was widespread in Shiga in the early 1970s in labour-union and agricultural-cooperative wives’ groups and this knowledge was communicated to cooperative associations concerned about the pollution of the lake, and gradually the problem was commonly framed through communication as ascribable to synthetic detergents. This became an opportunity for the Shiga Prefectural Government, which was searching for ways to deal with the eutrophication of Lake Biwa. The “red tide” in 1977 expedited the process. The Soap Forum set up by the prefectural government brought together groups concerned about the condition of Lake Biwa and a strategy was jointly developed at the Forum based on knowledge acceptable to all the parties participating. Consumer study groups, created by the prefectural government from 1971, housewives’ groups, cooperatives, community groups and others that shared the desire to protect Lake Biwa all got together through a sense of obligation, mutuality, and reciprocity and supported, to some extent, by relationships of trust; each group had its own aims (Endo 1995) but the importance of involving more people to achieve the goal was greater at that stage than small differences they had in their approaches, and they all accepted the knowledge constructed. In the meantime, financial resources provided by the prefectural government to the Soap Forum, later renamed the Lake Biwa Forum, helped the campaign to continue until its final success with the enactment of the Eutrophication Control Ordinance in 1979 by the prefectural government’s regulatory power.

Keywords used by Rydin (2006) in explaining the process of collective action – common problem framing, construction of acceptable knowledge, goal sharing, joint strategy development, leading to implementation and final goal achievement – correspond exactly with the sequence of development of the Soap Movement. In this process key

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individuals such as leaders of the agricultural-cooperative wives’ group and of the consumers’ study group, and the prefectural governor, acted as “bracing SC generators” (BSCGs), bracing the connection of various groups to muster resources and generate collective action. As a result of being given a formal place to voice their concerns and ideas, the participants, mainly housewives, actively approached experts for information and formed their own opinions (Mrs M, Lake Biwa Forum). Housewives were definitely empowered by gaining more knowledge and communicating it, adjusting their understanding through collective learning. A remark by a Soap Movement activist describes the way housewives empowered themselves in the process:

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Since the [time of the Soap] Movement, women have really studied hard doing consumer group and other activities . . . so much so that men could not follow the pace at which women were learning. . . . Men were busy and tired from their work and they knew little of consumer issues. So I even wished from time to time they’d studied more. (Yokoyama 2004, p. 27)

Becoming assured in what they were doing through learning, they advanced the movement with confidence; the mobilisation was stronger and faster because of the information flow from actor to actor. This was probably the reason for the movement’s quick spread from Shiga in western Japan to eastern and northern parts of Japan. I myself was recommended to use soap powder instead of synthetic detergents by a housewife in 1978 in Tokyo. In Figure 1 the roles played by the three types of SC are indicated: bonding SC expedited common problem framing within each community, and bridging SC expedited information flow between communities, while bracing SC consolidated connections between networks and ensured implementation by assembling all the available resources. Mobilising people in the Soap Movement was, however, relatively easy because the problem, the red tide, was visible so that the recognition of the urgency of the issue was readily shared by people in Shiga (Hasegawa 2003, p. 48).

Compared to this, increasing people’s participation in more local citizen initiatives to achieve sustainability is much more difficult. Ensuring that goals or values are shared within a community which is a mixture of old and new residents, or between different communities, seems to be the hardest part in network building and generating SC to work together. In the words of a Kyoto machizukuri1 (community/neighbourhood planning) activist: Ensuring that values are shared is difficult because it could touch on the matter of private rights when trying to find an agreement on a pleasant streetscape, and therefore what we can do to reach a consensus is just keep on transmitting information hoping in the meantime that people who are indifferent to the matter will have a chance to overhear or somehow notice, that people who are trying not to get involved start to consider what should be done, and that people looking on at “people doing machizukuri (neighbourhood planning)” will consider coming closer [to the network] to work together. (Mr K. Shimomae, Aneya Lane, Kyoto)

This comment suggests that one important role among others being played by Mr Shimomae and other machizukuri activists is to keep information flowing. Mr M. Tamba of the East Shiga WESGA2 water environment group described his experience in building networks with various groups. The group has been working on building a network of communities throughout the watershed that contains all the watercourses related to the conservation of Lake Biwa. People in communities with a long tradition have close intra-community ties and therefore success in persuading one person in such a community to participate tends to

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lead to the whole group’s participation. This is assumed to be due to a reciprocal relationship of obligation and expectation: “they helped us at the time of our . . .., so we should help them now”. When connecting with newly established groups, identifying a common goal or interest is the only way forward. For this Mr Tamba suggests allowing people to spend enough time expressing themselves to each other in purposive discursive discussion until it reaches a point where both sides “come to terms emotionally as well as logically”: at a certain point both sides come to realise where they should compromise with each other in order to work together, so they can realise mutual benefit. This is a decision based on a rational calculation of the ensuing benefits being greater than the costs of working together. When this is still difficult, they work only on “building images” regarding what they can do together, which can sometimes take as long as a year. By adopting this flexible and patient approach, Mr Tamba extended the group’s network to involve 257 individuals, 11 neighbourhood associations (NAs), and 7 corporations. This was quite an achievement, given the rather independent nature of NAs and the cost2benefit orientation of businesses when engaging in community activities. Mr Tamba uses this negotiation style in dealing with municipal government or municipal assembly members as well; he regards this as a form of “citizen participation”. His group will not accept just being used by local government as volunteers as a means of achieving its own goals; they believe there should be concrete proposals offering [at least] two options if it wants to work with the group on joint projects. In relation to collaboration with local government, the roles he believes should be played by citizens are as follows: to give it information on the state of the local community, to give the opinions of the community, to form a consensus (within the community and between communities) through dialogue and exchanges regarding the government proposals, and to cooperate as much as possible in implementation of agreed measures. Here also, the relationship seems to be based upon mutuality and reciprocity, with trust maintained by “providing [working partners] with the maximum cooperation during implementation”. In the end the role being played by Mr Tamba is one of connecting different networks, bonding and bridging ones, thus creating a bracing network. This can be seen in his remark: when we cannot have the cooperation of the town government, we will go to the prefectural government . . . if not either, we will go to the central government, but always with an attitude of dialogue, not confrontation, with humour and respect in negotiation.

This discursive process of groups of different cultures finally coming to work together reminds us of Habermas’ (1984) “communicative action”, which focuses on how communicative exchanges are able to take place collaboratively and reciprocally. Drawing on Habermas, Healey (2006, p. 51) argues that “making sense together” while “living differently” takes more than one kind of reasoning: scientific and rationalist reasoning, reasoning focused around values and ethics, and reasoning derived from emotive experience. Thus Figure 1, which describes the dynamics of SC accumulation for collective action, building on networks with other groups by going through the process of common problem framing, knowledge sharing, and joint strategy formation to achieve a shared goal also explains the process of SC accumulation in the development process of local citizens’ projects for sustainability in which collective action comes about in a gradual manner. In either case, key individuals such as Mr Tamba perform the role of BSCGs connecting various networks by “identifying the commonness” among them through discursive discussions with an eventual goal in mind, while keeping information flow and resource flow going, thereby making network building capability stronger.

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After the Soap Movement in Shiga, BSCGs developed projects based upon their thoughts as to what needed to be done to build a sustainable future for their community.

Mr N. Isaka, a pioneer environmental educationalist, felt giving environmental education to children was a way forward for preserving the natural environment and set up an innovative “exploratory, experiential, experimental” programme of environmental education.

Mr K. Kitagawa, a prefectural government official, initiated the Green Purchasing Network (GPN) in 1994 in government offices, which have large-scale procurement programmes, to promote the “greening” of production. This GPN system was gradually adopted in many other localities in Japan as well as other countries. Mrs A. Fujii, an exSoap Movement activist, established Japan’s first “Environmental Cooperative” to sell environmentally friendly products, including small-scale fibreglass-reinforced plastic troughs to provide advanced biological wastewater treatment at individual houses in rural areas. She also started the Nanohana (rapeseed) Zero-Waste Project, which not only produces rapeseed oil (for deep frying) but also collects the waste oil from households and restaurants to manufacture soap or biodiesel fuel. This project eventually spread to 142 municipalities in 41 of Japan’s 47 prefectures. The project involved many people in the process of its nationwide development; this may be because the idea suited Japan’s traditional concept of “mottainai” – not wasting resources with a sense of gratitude to nature – or it may be because it provided community people with places to meet and work together socially for a good cause, have fun, and create a good reputation, thus causing SC to grow.

SC and sustainability in Shiga: a quantitative investigation Some scholars note that SC can be accumulated in the process of capacity building, and that this also provides opportunities for social relationships (Healey 2003, 2006, Evans et al.

2005, Rydin and Falleth 2006). As an effective way of accomplishing capacity building, citizen participation or collaboration with stakeholders is suggested (Skinner 1997).

Based on the observation made by Ostrom (1999, p. 181) that “social capital is not easy to see and measure, however, the self-organising processes that social capital facilitates generate outcomes that are visible, tangible, and measureable”, it is premised here that the extent of collaborative project development can be considered as an important indicator for the availability of SC. Here the accumulation of SC in Shiga’s sustainability projects developed by citizens’ groups after the Soap Movement was measured by three criteria: SC-1 depth of collaboration – how many phases of a project (planning, decisionmaking, implementing, and monitoring) were collaboratively developed; SC-2 breadth of collaboration – how many types of actors were involved (NGOs/experts, business, citizens’ groups, and local government) in a project, and SC-3 continuance of a project – how long these projects continued.

First, two lists were prepared to examine the hypothesis: a “List of Key Persons” (a list of individuals, collected by a snowballing method, these individuals being known for having played an important role at any time in the last 40 years in making Shiga sustainable); and a “List of Shiga’s Key Projects” (a list of projects that were selected by the key persons during the snowballing interviews as having made a contribution to Shiga’s sustainability). The number of people who appeared in the List of Key Persons was 102. From this list, the names of people who were mentioned by only one person were eliminated to remove any possibility of biased nominations, and this produced a list of 69 individuals and a list of 55 projects. These 69 people represent those who have been active in working with other individuals for the same or similar goals. In

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compiling the “Key Projects” list, the following information was collected from these 69 individuals: . .

.

.

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.

main contributors to the projects, evaluation of the degree of success of the project on a scale of 1 (small) to 4 (maximum); SC-1 depth of collaboration: a project is scored with 1 –4 points based on the number of phases collaboratively developed; SC-2 breadth of collaboration: a project is scored with 1 – 4 points based on the number of types of actors involved in collaborative project development; and SC-3 continuance: a project is scored with 1 – 4 points based on the number of years it continued (1 point if continued less than 2 years, 2 points if 2 ≤ 5 years, 3 points if 5≤10 years, and 4 points if 10 years or longer).

The average score of each project was produced by dividing the aggregate of scores by the number of people who evaluated the project and this average score was used to examine the validity of the hypothesis.

Based upon a survey investigation, Figure 2 – Shiga Network Diagram – was produced. This shows the types of actors there were in 2008 in the Shiga community for sustainability, and also the availability of potential BSCGs, who connected actors across sectors and levels. The alphabetic letters represent individuals. The shapes show the types of organisations they belonged to, colours show the areas they were working in, the colours of the individuals’ names show if they were government or ex-government officials. The sizes of the different shapes indicate very roughly the relative number of ties they had.

Not counting the prefectural governor and city mayors, nine potential BSCGs were identified: A, a former prefectural employee, who now runs a non-profit organisation (NPO) support centre; F, a woman activist who established the Environmental Cooperative (NPO) and started the widely replicated Nanohana (rapeseed) Zero-Waste Project; K K, a prefectural staff member seconded to the local office, who initiated the GPN, which has spread nationwide; Mo, a widely respected Shiga business/opinion leader with a strong belief in the importance of creating a “recycling-oriented society”; M, an ex-Soap Movement activist housewife and a promoter of Shiga’s “Stop the Ozone Network”; N, a visionary academic advisor of Kyoto City’s environmental policies, and one of the main architects of the “Sustainable Shiga 2030” GHG gas halving scenario as the head of the prefectural research institute; T, the leader of Carbon Sink (NPO), a group of environmentally conscious individuals including four BSCGs; Nu, a traditional confectionery company’s environmental unit chief, interested in reviving “natural farming” such as no-till farming; and Ko, an architect by profession and a machizukuri (community planning) leader in a city in the north of Shiga, who runs a welfare NPO and a school for school dropouts.

From the snowballing interviews, it was found that there are networks linking individuals who devise and implement projects to support the handicapped, elderly people, and school

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Figure 2. Shiga Network Diagram in 2008.

Source: Kusakabe (2011).

dropouts, and to work on the restoration of forests and Lake Biwa, and that academics and NPOs are major players in Shiga’s community for sustainability. A recent trend is to devise projects which combine welfare and environmental goals to cope with reduced grant funding opportunities.

Second, the types of networks existing in Shiga’s community for sustainability were examined using network analysis. It was found that there actually exist dense networks

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Figure 3. The three types of SC network for sustainability in Shiga in 2008.

Source: Kusakabe (2011).

of the three types of SC as indicated in Figure 3, an output produced using a network analysis software, UCINET, and the algorithm Network . Subgroups . Factions. While the data used for network analysis most commonly measure relations at the micro level, and analysis techniques are used to infer the presence of social structure at the macro level, here a top-down approach was used, that is, “sub-structures” were identified as parts that are denser locally than is the field as a whole (Hanneman and Riddle 2005). A “faction” is a set of actors who have a high density of ties among themselves. The algorithm groups them by maximising the connections within factions and minimising those between factions (Hanneman and Riddle 2005). When there was a connection between two individuals, “1” was entered in an adjacency matrix. When there was no connection, and also along the diagonal line of same-person intersections, “0” was entered – which appears as a blank space in the output, Figure 3. Based upon the matrix produced, the algorithm was run to find the optimal arrangement of actors within factions, in terms of maximising similarity to the information obtained from these individuals. This was the case of seven factions and the “Final Proportion Correct” was at 0.776 in the output. In Figure 3, the names of 69 individuals appear symmetrically in the top row and the leftmost column.

Each small black dot (representing a figure “1”) indicates that there is a tie between the pair. One conspicuous feature of the analysis is that a large faction of 24 persons was identified; this is the Mixed Group. The people who make up the group are shown to be very well connected not only with each of the others within this group, but also with other people in the other groups. In the process of running the tool about a dozen times until the optimal number of factions for the network was found, these 24 people did not break into two groups even when the number of factions was increased to the point where meaningless groups would be formed.

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The seven factions are: Faction 1 – The Ex-Soap Movement Activists Group including Mrs M, and Mr Nog, an electrical appliance shop owner, the leader of the anti-CFC (chlorofluorocarbon) campaign in Shiga; Faction 2 – The Water Environment Group made up of two large Lake Biwa water conservation associations; Faction 3 – The Mixed Group made up of 10 academics, 5 NPOs, 3 politicians, 3 business people, 2 prefectural government staff seconded to the city branch, and 1 city staff member; Faction 4 – The Business Group made up of five business people, one city government official in charge of LA 21 Forum, and an environmental NPO leader; Faction 5 – The Yasu City Group with leading members of the city’s machizukuri (community planning) processes which have relatively few ties outside the city; Faction 6 – The “Natural Farming” Group, possibly centring on Mr Nu, business environmental unit chief, whose interest is in “natural farming” and welfare; Faction 7 – The NPO Group with members that are well connected with some members of the Mixed Group.

More importantly, the existence of all three types of SC networks – bonding, bridging, and bracing – in Shiga’s community for sustainability was clearly indicated in this diagram. The seven “boxes” along the diagonal line in Figure 3 show the connections between members within each faction. If there were no dots outside these seven boxes, this would mean that the Shiga community for building sustainability comprises only seven networks of bonding SC, each with a different focus – one place-based, one ex-“Soap Movement” group, one “water environment” group, etc. It follows that Figure 3 shows the existence of seven bonding SC networks of individuals who have contributed to Shiga’s sustainability.

The dots outside these seven boxes indicate that there are individuals who connect with the other factions’ members. This means that these connections to individuals in other factions act to form bridging networks. Figure 3 indicates that the Shiga community for sustainability is a rather well-connected society with lots of individuals creating bridges between different groups.

In the Mixed Group of 24 members, 9 individuals in the faction are in fact connected with all the 7 factions, 5 are connected with 6 factions, and 5 with 5 factions. This shows that 19 of 24 individuals in the Mixed Group have connections with five factions or more out of the seven factions in Shiga’s sustainability community. The members of the Mixed Group together fit the definition of a bracing SC network suggested by Rydin and Falleth (2006, p. 25): [it] would operate within a delimited set of actors, allowing for strong bonds to be built between at least some of these actors, but the set would range across different local communities and groups, across sectors, across tiers and geographical spaces.

The interviews with 19 out of the 24 people in this group indicated that the connections and bonds between them are currently active. It can therefore be said that this Mixed Group is effectively the “bracing SC network” of the Shiga community for building sustainability.

Examining the effect of the bracing SC networks As the third stage, the effect of bracing SC was examined; more specifically I investigated whether the involvement of BSCGs in project development made the SD achievement

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better. The method of calculating a person’s “bracingness” for the present research was considered at this point. Initially, I paid close attention to the values UCINETcan provide for individuals’ Bonacich’s “closeness” and Freeman’s “betweenness” centrality: Bonacich’s closeness measures how close an individual member is to other members of a community and Freeman’s betweenness measures how many pairs a person bridges as an intermediary in the community. Having high values in these two clearly indicates a person’s higher degree of centrality than the others in a community, and it might seem that adding these two values could serve as an indicator for individuals’ bracingness. However, I decided that bracingness should more appropriately be measured by the number of factions an actor is connected to; the ability to connect with many factions (communities) rather than having many ties in a smaller number of factions best captures the underlying function of bracing SC. Table 1 shows the bracingness level of Shiga key persons for sustainability. The betweenness value of these individuals can vary a great deal even when the number of factions they connect to is the same; although Mr Tamba is connected to all seven factions, the number of ties he has in the whole community (Freeman degree) is much smaller than for Mrs Fujii (33 as against her 56), and therefore the number of pairs he can go between (Freeman betweenness) is much smaller than for Mrs Fujii (3.48 to her 10.75). However, his Bonacich closeness is not so low (Fujii 17.62; Tamba 10.99; the lowest 0.94) because he is connected to actors whose centrality is high in each faction.

I then examined whether the involvement of BSCGs in “Shiga Projects” affected the level of achievement of sustainability. For this investigation, the correlation between the bracingness level of BSCGs and the SD achievement level of each project was examined.

The former was calculated as follows: (1) The collective bracingness level of the main contributors to each project was defined as the average of these main contributors’ bracingness.

Table 1. Bracingness level of Shiga key persons for sustainability.

Ranking by sum of Bonacich centrality and Freeman betweenness 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

BSCGs

Number of factions the actor connects

Sum of Bonacich centrality and Freeman betweenness

Bonacich power centrality: normalised

Freeman betweenness centrality: normalised

Freeman degree

Fujii Isaka T A Y MS RK Kitagawa N Tamba Yam No Ka Ok TK Nog

7 7 7 7 7 7 6 7 7 7 6 7 6 6 6 6

28.36 26.29 22.71 22.56 17.14 16.94 15.04 14.71 14.60 14.47 12.69 12.60 12.30 12.20 11.66 10.80

17.62 17.30 15.39 15.55 14.63 13.14 12.41 12.81 12.43 10.99 9.10 11.21 11.39 10.91 9.71 9.82

10.75 8.98 7.32 7.01 2.50 3.80 2.62 1.90 2.17 3.48 3.60 1.38 0.92 1.29 1.95 0.98

56 55 48 49 40 39 36 35 34 33 26 31 28 30 26 26

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(2) When a project’s main contributors included people whose names were not in the “Key Persons’ List”, their bracingness was assumed to be “2”; The number 2 was selected as the median of faction numbers of key persons in the List who had a faction number below the 4.3 average. Because there were 12 people who were connected to just one faction beyond his or her own in the “Key Persons’ List” and 2 people were not connected to any other faction, this seemed a fair benchmark.

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Table 2 shows the results of the regression analysis. The correlation coefficient between the level of average bracingness of main contributors (BSCG average) and the level of SD achievement was 0.84, which suggests a relatively strong positive correlation between the two variables. This result is supported by the regression analysis shown in Figure 4 with its positive slope of 0.30, R2 0.70 and t-statistic 9.65. This indicates that the involvement of BSCGs in projects makes a positive contribution to the level of achievement in sustainability at the 99% confidence level. Table 2 also shows which of 55 projects/activities were given highest marks for their contribution to Shiga’s sustainability: top Environmental

Table 2. The correlation between average bracingness of main contributors and the SD achievement level of Shiga Key Projects.

Correlation coefficient

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

1 BSCG average

0.84 SD level

Shiga Projects for sustainability

SC-1

SC-2

SC-3

SC average

† Environmental Cooperative † Soap Movement † Nanohana (rapeseed) Zero-waste Project † GPN † Otsu Environmental Forum (Agenda 21 Otsu) † Yurin Kai (enjoy forest society) † Machi Kado (street corner) Care Shiga Net for machizukuri with focus on community-based, small-scale, multifunctional, two-way elderly care † Gamouno Kougen (think-and-act) Club for exploratory, experiential, experimental environmental education † Shiga’s Save the Ozone Network † Akanoi-Biwako Environmental Citizens’ Initiative † “Oumi Future Private School” for fostering “community producers” † Higashiomi Nature Symbiosis Society Building Committee (City scenariomaking to achieve 50% reduction of CO2 by 2030) † World Lake Conference Citizens’ Net † Sustainable Shiga 2030 † MOH Journal – to communicate and convey the message of Shiga’s traditional principles of MOH – Mottainai, Okagesamade, Hodohodoni (not wasting, with gratitude to nature, aware that resources are limited)

4 3 4 4 3

4 4 4 4 4

4 4 3 3 2

4.00 3.67 3.67 3.67 3.00

7 4.2 6 7 6

4.00 3.73 3.67 3.63 3.59

3 4

4 4

4 2

3.67 3.33

6 5.7

3.58 3.50

4

3

4

3.67

7

3.41

4 3

4 4

4 3

4.00 3.33

5.7 4

3.33 3.29

3

3

3

3.00

5

3.26

3

4

3

3.33

5

3.20

2 2 3

4 3 4

3 1 2

3.00 2.00 3.00

5.7 5.5 5.5

3.17 3.15 3.14

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Figure 4.

Regression results for the SD achievement level explained by BSCD average.

Cooperative, second Soap Movement, third Nanohana (rapeseed) Zero-Waste Project, and fourth GPN. The significance of the involvement of BSCGs in those projects can be understood by seeing who were involved as BSCGs: Mrs Fujii for the Environmental Cooperative and the Nanohana (rapeseed) Zero-Waste Project, Mr K. Kitagawa for GPN. Mr Isaka’s Gamouno Kougen (think-and-act) Club for environmental education came eighth. All three individuals connect the seven factions in the community and it is not hard to imagine that their wide-ranging networks helped their projects to spread widely in Shiga.

In Table 2, SC average shows the average score of each project in terms of “depth” and “breadth” of collaboration in the development process of the project and its continuance.

This value mostly indicates the impact of bonding and bridging capital but not, to any significant extent, that of bracing capital; SC accumulation within communities (bonding SC) and between various stakeholders (bridging SC) through project development may not by itself fully capture the operation of SC. Therefore the effect of these three types of SC was examined next using two explanatory X variables. The equation for this calculation is (see Figure 5(a,b)): Y =a + bX1 + gX2 (X1 : SC Average X2 : BSCG Average Y : SD Achievement) =1.20 + 0.21X1 + 0.26X2 (5.52) (2.37) (7.15) (t statistics).

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Figure 5. Regression results for the SD achievement level explained by SC average and BSCD average.

This result indicates that there is a stronger positive explanatory power of the two X variables in relation to Y with R2 0.74, higher than the R2 0.70 when there was only one X variable (BSCGs). This suggests that the research hypothesis 2 accumulation of SC makes a difference in the progress towards sustainability 2 is true. I argue therefore, based on both qualitative and quantitative investigation, that the existence of bracing SC has a signiďŹ cant impact on the level of sustainability achievement. Observers may wonder, however, if there might have been particular cultural forces at work in this Shiga case and if its ďŹ ndings may not be applicable to other cultural environments. There may be some cultural particularities

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in Shiga due to the existence of Lake Biwa, but there are many other places where communities have achieved their aims collaboratively, such as Sendai City’s citizen-led citywide studless winter snow tyre-use campaign (to prevent dust haze) and Hino City’s bottomup community planning (machizukuri) which has been active since 1994, both examples taking place in urban settings with populations of 1 million and 180,000, respectively (Hasegawa 2001, 2004, Barrett 2005). Another example in an urban setting is the “Meanwhile Gardens” project in London in 1976, in which derelict wasteland with crumbling canalside terrace housing was transformed into a community garden in 2 years, providing an oasis in a densely populated part of North Kensington (Towers 1995). This was led by a local sculptor, Jamie McCullough, involving many architects, planners, and building designers committed to the principles of user participation and cooperation through selfhelp. In all these cases, citizens wanted to change the local situation where they were and this kick-started networking processes through knowledge/information exchanges.

Conclusion This study investigated the widely discussed question of whether SC helps in achieving sustainability goals. It showed, using the case study of Shiga, a regional community aiming for SD, the existence of three types of SC networks, quantitatively measured their effects, and qualitatively suggested the different roles the three types of SC – bonding, bridging, and bracing – play in the process of SC accumulation. While bonding SC builds on effective norms and achieves solidarity within communities but limits access to various external resources, and bridging SC helps to extend the network and can maintain information flow but is weak in generating collective action through solidarity creation, bracing SC can expedite common problem framing and joint strategy formation by connecting various networks across sectors, scales, and localities, thus making it possible for collective action to occur. The study concludes that SC can indeed help in achieving sustainability goals and that bracing SC plays an essential role in expediting the processes of goal sharing and resource flows for sustainability. Though no conclusive judgement can be made from this case study alone, it appears that supporting the generation of a mix of the three types of SC networks may help local government endeavours to achieve the desired policy goal of SD.

Notes 1.

2.

Machizukuri was translated by Evans (2002) as community/neighbourhood planning, implying substantive citizen involvement in city planning or autonomous neighbourhood planning.

East-Shiga Water Environment Self-Governance Association (Higashiomi Mizu-Kankyou Jichi Kyougikai).

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