Expert social capital recipes? I prefer home cooking

UK Government adviser David Halpern is providing practical recipes for building social capital - the trust and shared values that help societies to function effectively - in a book due out later this year. The Sunday Times (probably not an ideological ally) reports these include everything from televised debates, to more cul-de-sacs and park keepers. Teenagers would be taught parenting at schools.
'When children were older they would be given adult “mentors” and asked to act as mentors to other children. This would be extended to young parents who would be mentored by older parents, while “business angels” — experienced or retired businessmen — would offer their help to entrepreneurs struggling with business start-ups,' writes John Elliot.
Halpern, who emphasised that his plans were not government policy, said the financial cost of implementing them had yet to be worked out: “Most of them are not necessarily phenomenally expensive. It’s about strengthening the social fabric, so that some other things which are potentially very costly don’t happen. It’s just that we’ll have more pleasant lives if we do something about it.”
Last year Drew Mackie and I ran a workshop at a Ruralnet conference and asked participants first to invent a fictitious but realistic village, with a range of local groups, and then come up with ideas for increasing social capital. They were then asked to suggest how this would increase financial, physical, human and natural capitals. We found everyone very creative, and you can see (left clickable) they came with plenty of ideas. You can see (right clickable) what they thought that the village panto group could achieve. David Halpern's ideas may be great (though difficult to evaluate without a longer summary) - but I think that what will be more important are those actions developed and 'owned' by people who are expected to carry them out. Exhortation's from the Home Office won't work. Home cooking is likely to be best.
If you want to develop your own recipes workshop instructions here.
Thanks to Will Davies for the link on iWire. Will wrote an excellent report on social capital and social software
Download 2002 discussion paper by David Halpern and colleagues (pdf) here.

Update
Kevin Harris muses on his Neighbourhoods blog whether we could or should produce league tables of neighbourly behaviour. He cites Jane Jacobs caution, writing about public contact at local level – “Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.”

Comments

[Lee Bryant]

Hi David,

Mr. Halpern has obviously been studying Muhamar El-Ghaddafi's Green Book, which used to set out a similar idyllic vision of empowered local citizens debating issues and sharing communal tasks.

Coming from a generation of (New Labour) technocrats who on the whole have no moral compass whatsoever, I find these ideas scary to say the least. You are spot on to focus on the home cooked version.

Many societies do what Halpern describes, and have much stronger social capital than we do, but I have real doubts that you can create it (especially through government intervention) where it does not exist. Perhaps they should call it GM-social capital.....

These are cultural problem that require much deeper changes to the way we live if they are to be addressed.