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This article examines whether mayors' social capital increases local governments' performance. Putnam suggests that politicians' social networks with residents may deteriorate political transparency and thus decrease performance. However, no direct relationships have been clarified. So, we focus on the Philippines as a case and conduct a survey on national representative 300 cities and municipalities in 2011. We find that (1) by distributions, among three indexes of performance as dependent variables, valuing fundamentals of governance have the highest scores. Social governance and administrative governance follow. Among mayors' networks as independent variables, mayors meet residents most, and local politicians, provincial politicians, and the central government officers follow. (2) By regression analyses, meeting residents promotes social governance, while meeting central government officers increases administrative governance. Multi-level analyses support these results. Therefore, mayors' social capital increases local governments' performance. Yet different social capital promotes different performance.

Introduction -- Earthquakes and urban reconstruction -- Kobe and the Hanshin earthquake -- The planning and reconstruction response -- Protest, participation, and the Phoenix Plan -- Neighbourhood case studies -- Symbolic projects and the local economy -- Conclusion -- Appendices. Chronology of the ten-year reconstruction period in Kobe (1995-2005) ; National government relief and recovery measures ; Major reconstruction actions taken by local government in 1995.