Strictly speaking, one did not need the concept of social capital to have a conversation about the salience of social norms and networks prior to its rise in popularity, but to have such conversations in the public domain, and to have them across so many different sectors and countries, something is required that is more encompassing and tractable than these formal academic terms supply. For organizations like the World Bank, for example, which itself had only established a department for social development concerns in 1995, the timely emergence of social capital seemed to offer a convenient discursive bridge between economics (the dominant discipline at the bank) and the other social sciences (Bebbington et al. 2006). For its emerging portfolio of projects that stressed civic participation, harnessing and “building” social capital provided the necessary (if crude and imperfect) discursive justification that World Bank vice presidents and task man- agers needed to distinguish their proposals from those of more orthodox initiatives that focused on building “human capital” (schools and hospitals) and “physical capital” (road, bridges, and irrigation systems). Moreover, they rightly argued, even the efficacy of education and agriculture projects turns in no small measure on their engagement with the local social context. Community norms and civil society networks, for example, play a major role in shaping the extent to which farmers adopt technical innovations such as new fertilizers (Isham 2002). Independently of whether such projects worked or could be shown to be demonstrably better than their alternatives, they first had to be demarcated, justified, and promoted, and a constituency supporting them had to be mobilized. Using the language of social capital performed these tasks.