Social Capital, Broken Trust, and Social Accountability: Exploring the Role of Religion in Microfinance Context

Social capital has been long known as a source of capital in lending mechanisms of microfinance institutions. The mechanism bring along a concept of joint liability where all members of a group share responsibility in the case of default in a member repayment. The application of such liability also cause with drawal from members whose trust are broken because other member failed to repay the loan as promised. This research is aimed to investigate how Islamic religion plays a role in forming and strengthening the social capital and how it works to restore trust and discipline the payment behaviour of all group members. How social capital gets formed, developed and create a different form of accountability in the midst of religion principles is also explored in this study. The study is conducted using the participatory action research in a Sharia-based cooperative in Depok, Indonesia. Bordieu‘s concept of social capital (networking, reciprocity and trust) is used as the framework for mobilizing and analysing the findings of this study. The findings contribute to the literature of social capital and microfinance in terms of the use of religion factor as a moderating factor to strengthen the social capital, social accountability, and to increase the performance of microfinance institutions.