Cashable Value: Social Capital and Practical Habits in the Analysis of Collaborative Cross-Border Economic Development

Today’s climate of heightened border security has intensified a key challenge found on border regions: coordination across institutional regimes. For 30 years or more a popular concept for explaining groups’ abilities to handle such challenges has been social capital and its variants, such as collective efficacy. While in many respects useful, these concepts are hindered in their explanatory power due to the lack of precision in their definition and a misplaced analogy of group capacities to capital stocks. This paper therefore takes a dissenting view from the special issue’s premise that questions of cross-border collaboration are fully amenable to a social capital-based framework. Rather, it aims to contribute to the borderlands studies research community’s tools for moving beyond some widely-acknowledged limitations to social capital frameworks by introducing complementary concepts and methods that emerge from an historical ethnography of two US-Mexico border city pairs whose economic fortunes diverged after the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Although capital stocks cannot account for this divergence, local practices and habits of business and political elites’ policy implementation do, suggesting that researchers interested in these topics need to broaden their methods and concepts to help deal with the contradictory challenges of liberalized commerce and heightened security that today’s border regions face.