Institute of Development Studies

The promise of capacity?

10 May 2010 - Katy Oswald and Peter Clarke

'Capacity development' implies a promise of growing self-reliance, national ownership and sustainability. Yet practice seems consistently to fall short of this promise. Published today, the latest issue of the IDS Bulletin, 'Reflecting Collectively on Capacities for Change', calls for a reframing of capacity development for social change, to recover this promise. It reminds us that capacity development is above all a political process, and not just a technical one.

The importance of learning

Social change processes are complex and non-linear. This has implications for the way in which capacity development processes are supported. It calls into question the 'deficit' approach, where external actors identify capacities they consider are lacking, and seek to build them in specific individuals or organisations. Instead, the IDS Bulletin argues that practitioners need to understand the detailed dynamics of culture and power in specific contexts, to identify and support energies for positive change, and work to connect and facilitate them.

Capacity development is understood as a collective process of learning and reflection. Practitioners working to support capacity development need to acknowledge complexity, and be open to learning themselves as part of the process. At the centre of this approach is the importance of questioning assumptions. This understanding of capacity development implies huge challenges for development practice, and so it inevitably requires considerable personal and organisational commitment.

Key questions about capacity development

Based on experiences in countries as varied as Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Peru, the journal looks at three critical questions:

• What capacities are most needed to contribute to emancipatory social change?
• How do successful endogenous processes of capacity development take place?
• How can processes of capacity development be supported purposefully?

The contributors show the importance of the capacities to navigate complexity, to understand and engage with power, and to learn and adapt. Successful capacity development processes are shown to be driven by values and leadership, to be built through relationships and to depend on learning at multiple levels. Purposeful support will need to work with existing contextual energies and promote critical and creative reflection in all actors. It also needs to appreciate the wider context of specific interventions and work responsively. This requires creating time and space for learning.

The Capacity Collective

The editors intend this IDS Bulletin to be an invitation to engage with a collective inquiry into capacity development processes. The Capacity Collective is an open group, facilitated by IDS, which aims to encourage debate around these issues.

The Capacity Collective values a diversity of perspectives and aims to link them to many existing initiatives in this area. These perspectives may be from activists in social movements, practitioners who are interested in exploring the theoretical grounding of different approaches, researchers looking to bridge theory and practice, or those in donor organisations concerned to recover the emancipatory potential of capacity development. New collaborators are invited to contact the Capacity Collective through the website.

Katy Oswald and Peter Clarke are Research Officers in the Participation, Power and Social Change team.

Related Publications

• Oswald, K. and Clarke, P. (2010) 'Reflecting Collectively on Capacities for Change', IDS Bulletin 41.3, Brighton: IDS

Related Projects

• Capacity Collective - Exploring and addressing the challenges facing capacity development to bring about change in a purposeful way (2008 - 2011)