Do Cross Sector Collaborations Need Social Capital? A Tool for Quantification and Validation

Practitioners and policymakers often observe that collaboration among public, non-profit and private sector leadership is crucial to the economic prosperity of the places in which they operate. But not all collaborations are equally effective. What are the determinants of effective collaboration? Many argue that a set of conditions, such as trust and relationship strength contribute to producing the stronger outcomes that the collaboration intended to achieve. Measuring those conditions could be of value to proponents and practitioners of collaborative efforts. Furthermore, if those conditions can be measured and changed, it might be possible to improve upon the outcomes a collaborative effort could achieve by using such measurements to direct productive change in the conditions. A widely-studied concept that captures many aspects of the determinants of effective collaboration is “Social capital,” defined as “the institutions, relationships, attitudes, and values that govern interactions among people and contribute to economic and social development.” (Grootaert and Van Bastelar, 2004). In this project, we aimed to develop a measure of social capital that captures the determinants of effective collaboration across the aforementioned sectors. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and share this measure. We do not assess the effectiveness of specific collaborative efforts at this stage. However, future research aimed at measuring the effectiveness of specific collaborative efforts according to the achievement of specified goals could benefit by measuring cross-sector social capital at different stages of the efforts and assessing whether there is an association between levels of cross-sector social capital and outcomes