Social Capital and Natural Resource Management: An Application to Landcare

Social capital has been increasingly recognised as a fundamental ingredient to the success of natural resource management (NRM) within rural and regional communities. Landcare, with its extensive local group structure and community-state partnership, provides a notable case of the importance of social capital to NRM. However identifying processes and practices to enhance social capital have been problematic given the theoretical and empirical ambiguities surrounding the concept. In this paper we apply an analytical framework recognising the sources, characteristics and consequences of social capital to Landcare. The framework recognises the importance of both community and state/institutional sources of social capital and suggests a series of measures of social capital appropriate to Landcare.