Social Capital and Local Governance Regimes: Early Childhood Development Roundtables in British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTThe concept of social capital has received enormous attention in social sciences and beyond. Researchers have shown a particular interest in effects - how neighbourhood social capital and local area environments might impact a variety of outcomes in positive and negative ways. However, insufficient attention has been given to issues of local governance in social capital literature, despite much of public policy, urban politics and multilevel governance literature associating local democracy with positive policy outcomes. Surprisingly, little such research has considered local governance in area of early childhood development (ECD). Therefore, paper will explore relationship between effects and local democracy within setting of policies for families and children. It will map and compare community governance structures at work in area of ECD in several communities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. Through lens of feminist political economy, paper canvasses ECD roundtables across BC communities, and identifies at least three regimes: Traditional Public Administration (TPA), New Public Management (NPM), and Community Democracy (CD). While all three are strongly shaped by dominant neoliberal context, community democracy seems to be most successful in bringing together procedural and substantive democracy in realm of ECD.Keywords: social capital; democracy; community engagementA Feminist Political Economy of Social Capital and Local GovernanceDespite immense popularity of social capital as an analytical and conceptual tool, it has attracted much criticism. While social capital can be useful to social science, greater attention must be paid to power relations in which it is embedded. This study locates both social capital and governance within a neoliberal gender order and an overarching political economy of residualism for ECD policy at both provincial and federal scales in Canada.Social Capital and Local GovernanceA range of social capital components (network ties and diversity, neighbourhood attachment, resources, collective efficacy, personal safety, health) are relevant to area of ECD. However, social capital tends to direct focus to level of individual or family (Warner, 1999), and not to impact of local governance and political processes and institutions (such as local political economy, community partnerships, citizen engagement) on child outcomes. This is indicative of a significant gap in social capital research, which largely sidesteps issues of democracy and state. In bulk of literature, very little is said about role of government in fostering or damaging social capital (Kumlin and Rothstein, 2005; OECD, 2001; Skocpol, 1996; Taylor, 2002 and 2003; Warner, 1999). Yet as Taylor indicates, the state has an important role to play in creating conditions in which social capital, and indeed civil society, can thrive and avoiding policies which destroy them (2003: 230). Local government can support and complement social capital development in communities (Taylor 2003; OECD 2001). Governance is also needed to address inequalities in social capital.This project makes questions of governance central to process of socialcapital development. It also contributes to public policy, urban politics, and multilevel governance literature, which associates local democracy with positive policy outcomes (Bradford, 2003a, 2005 and 2007). In doing so, study explores relationship between two concepts that have thus far remained largely distinct: effects (Kershaw et al., 2007) and neighbourhood, local, or community democracy (Taylor 2003). Neighbourhood effects refers to the impact on developmental outcomes of area in which children live (Beauvais and Jenson, 2003: v).Researchers have been canvassing multiplicity of experiments in neighbourhood, local, or community democracy, but seldom in area of ECD (Beauvais and Jenson 2003). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".