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Microfinance and social capital: does social capital help create good practice? Sanae ItoThe role of organising and disseminating knowledge as a global public good has become a major preoccupation of international development organisations. One area in which they are particularly active is support for microfinance programmes in developing countries. More recently, the microfinance 'best practices' deposited in, and disseminated by, these international organisations have been associated with social capital. This paper examines the ways in which the notion of social capital is employed to explain the success of microfinance programmes. It argues that various types of social interactions that are generated around successful microfinance operations are randomly called 'social capital'. This means that the presence of social capital does not tell us much about what sort of microfinance programmes, in terms of design and implementation, should be regarded as good practice.

This paper examines changing agrarian institutions in south-western Bangladesh where a large number of farmers, small and large, have switched from rice farming to export-oriented freshwater prawn farming within the last decade. The local economy boomed until ecological and managerial problems began to threaten the sustainability of the farming activities. At the same time, the impact of global competition is forcing the industry to adopt so-called global standards concerning food safety and sanitary conditions. This demands the restructuring of the local supply chain at the bottom of which a significant number of small farmers are struggling to survive. It is argued that this restructuring is leading to small farmers' reduced access to financial capital, and possibly to changes in ownership patterns of freshwater prawn farms. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper examines how development studies teachers in Japan are caught between Western and Eastern discourses of development amidst the changing political and economic realities unfolding in East Asia. The generally weak involvement of anthropologists in development studies teaching results in the preoccupation of Japan's development community with the task of uncovering the country's unique development experience distinct from the Western countries'. The paper argues that development studies institutions in Japan should become more sensitised to their identity as a source of discourse and that students doing development studies there should be taught to discern the competing Eastern and Western discourses of international development.

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