Does social capital make democracy work? Democracy is by definition empowering. A logical corollary is that development should be decentralised and with social capital, democracy and development could be packaged as a model for replication. Ground reality is more complex, as the fieldwork on which this paper is based shows. It also suggests that social capital cannot be understood outside of its particular cultural, ideological and institutional contexts or indeed independently of the nature of social segmentedness, whether along caste, class or any other lines.
