Linking Indigenous Social Capital to a Global Economy

efforts. This was the case, for example, with unsuccessful efforts to organize poor neighborhoods
in American cities during the 1960s.²¹

The second strategy for solving the public goods problem is to create individual selective
incentives that will induce individuals to contribute to a collective good as a by-product of their
contributions. Although the collective good, is a non-divisible public good that will benefit
everyone, its costs are borne by individual contributors because they receive some individual
benefit. The only way they can receive this selective benefit, however, is if they pay dues or in
some other way contribute to the costs of collective action. An example of this type of strategy
is the professional association that creates selective incentives for individuals to pay dues to
become members, but as a by-product their dues pay for the costs of non-divisible collective
goods, such as lobbying on behalf of the profession.²²

If we recognize that individuals are induced to participate in a wide variety of social
groups by a wide variety of incentives, both material and non-material, then the selective
incentive strategy is perhaps the most pervasive and effective solution to the public goods
problem. The logic of this strategy helps us understand why some groups are more successful
than others in linking indigenous bonding social capital to bridging social capital that can secure
resources for public goods. An empirical study conducted in the United States in the 1960s, for
example, attributed the phenomenal growth of "conservative" Protestant denominations to their
effective use of highly personalized incentives to potential members, including social incentives
related to fellowship and belonging, as well as individualized spiritual incentives. This attention
to selective incentives induced persons to join these churches and then to contribute significant
amounts of personal income to collective efforts that the churches defined as public goods.

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