Paper from the PASCAL International Observatory Conference, "Making Knowledge Work: Building Sustainable Partnerships through Place Management, Social Capital and Lifelong Learning" October 2005, University of Stirling, Scotland The purpose of this Paper is to sketch out the theoretical links between the key ideas behind the ‘agency’ of community and the institutional and organising conditions under which agency can be expressed. Together these ideas could potentially form the basis of a theory of ‘community capital’ and therefore give greater coherence to the myriad of ideas currently in play for which various claims of explanatory and predictive capacity are being made.