Social capital and culture: Master keys to development

This article explores the potential of social capital and culture for contributing to economic and social development. It centers its attention particularly on the situation of Latin America: a region with serious problems of poverty and lack of equity which affect vast sectors of the population, so that it has been considered the continent with the greatest levels of inequality. It is argued here that although it is true that the integration of the questions of social capital and culture into development discussions makes the search for suitable strategies and designs more complex, it is equally true that policies based on designs which leave out such aspects have proved to suffer from serious limitations. The article first of all explores the general idea of social capital, with emphasis not so much on theoretical analysis as on the concrete presence of such capital in actual situations. It then goes on to examine social capital in action in specific Latin American cases and finally formulates some considerations on the possible contributions of culture to Latin American development.