The Role of Social Capital in Poverty Alleviation in Native American Reservation Communities

Researchers’ and practitioners’ recognition of the importance of community social and cultural relations ( “social capital”) to effective implementation of poverty reduction projects and differences in social capital across communities suggest that such projects should be tailored to the types of social capital present in a given community. Drawing upon a data set collected by the Northwest Area Foundation of twelve Native American communities which includes a wide array of questions regarding social capital, this paper evaluates the different types of social capital in each community and considers the implications of that capital for the types of poverty reduction programs which would be effective in each community. We find differences in social capital across the communities in the study, with resulting differing implications for economic development and poverty reduction projects. Our results support observations that social capital is a community-specific phenomenon and must, therefore, be studied at the local level.