A Scoping Review of Social Capital’s Impact on Resilience Across the Humanitarian Development Peace Nexus

Abstract

The recent expansion of literature on social capital and resilience has resulted in multi-disciplinary applications, obscure conceptual parameters, and a range of overlapping and divergent results. This scoping review aims to understand how existing literature has framed the impact of social capital on community resilience across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus. The article systematically searched for English-language peer-reviewed academic journal articles from the Scopus database, returning 345 results which were narrowed to a final dataset containing 194 publications. From this, the article used meta-data tracking and content analysis to determine keyword frequency, geographical distribution, types of crisis, and forms of social capital (bonding, bridging and linking) under examination. Analysis of the forms of social capital reveals that bonding social capital has the most pronounced impact on community resilience. This is primarily at the level of first-response, whereas facilitating longer-term transformative resilience is associated more significantly with bridging and linking forms. However, the tendency to collapse these forms leads to challenges in discerning their unique impact on resilience. The study concludes that heterogeneity across contexts, forms and temporalities elicits programmatic variability for triple-nexus applications, inviting reflection on how to adapt social capital’s longstanding conceptual framework to achieve clearer measurable objectives.