What is Capacity Building? Conceptualising and core models in international practice Dr Susan Rosina Whittle Anne Colgan 

Literature Review Commissioned what and why … Our challenge was to look at how to put into practice what is known about developing capacities: – to better meet the needs of practitioners – to support evaluation – to help funders craft appropriate interventions 

3 Capacity? Capacity? Capacity? Capacity? Capacity? Capacity? ‘... really important to develop a narrative’. 3 What is capacity? 

4 Frameworks of Organisational Capacities How things are organised What people are working on How is the future worked on? ORGANISATION CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT 4 

Capacities can be learned explicitly … … or develop over time - intentionally & unintentionally. It’s easy to become proficient at the wrong things Change is more difficult as capacities become routines. 

Can you teach old dogs new tricks? Depends on Absorptive Capacity: the ability to recognise the value of new external information, assimilate it, and apply it to desired goals and objectives. Absorptive Capacity is low where:  Little history of significant change  Some skills & routines present to excess  The entity has few external reference points Absorptive Capacity enhanced by:  A history of changing  Access to memory (accumulated prior knowledge)  Doing own learning rather than adopting others  Critical friends – including theories and models BUT ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY OF WHAT? Am I an old dog? 

Capacity-building … means getting out of Project World, focusing less on supporting scores of projects and more on seeing any intervention within the wider context of social and other kinds of change – local, national, regional, and global. … it is necessary to look intelligently at the whole web of social relations within which these organisations and their activities are embedded. (Oxfam, 2010, p.207) 

Intervention Boundaries-in-the Mind REMEMBER The model is not the thing! 

Fields can change in several ways 1. Through the individual actions and choices of field members. Change emerges in the field population over time through new technologies, joint ventures, growth, decline in demand or resources, fashions. 2. Through planned interventions at field level by field members, regulators, funders, newcomers. 3. Through collective reaction to crises. Where do you intervene? Do you know enough about the relevant field(s) to make intelligent choices? UK Energy Policy 

Think of water as a field … where field characteristics (steam, liquid, ice) depend on strength of connections between molecules. Field-level Interventions: Cool liquid water > Ice. Heat liquid water > Steam. Add Salt > lowers freezing point Fields can have different properties at the same time… Where to draw the boundaries? Where to intervene? 

Organisations and Fields co-evolve (Trist, 1981). DANGER – risk of unintended consequences when: • invest in developing capacity in organisations without understanding the field(s) that organisations inhabit Or • attempt capacity development in fields without appreciating field’s dynamics and impacts of interventions on members. 

QUESTIONS TO ASK 1. How interconnected are organisations in this field? 2. Do a few large or key players set the agenda and the rules of the game or is it anybody’s game? 3. How well defined is this field and how strong are the boundaries? 4. How easy or difficult is it to start working in this field? Is the field wide open to newcomers? 5. Do some organisations act as gatekeepers, either by making resources available or legitimating/licensing new field members? 6. How static or turbulent is the field? Are the above characteristics changing quickly or not at all? 

What’s needed? 1. Not more of SAME but … understanding fields as purposive, not just ‘context’ 2. Mapping and modelling of fields 3. Design and development of ‘referent organisations’ to link individual field agents 4. Forums/ arenas to promote collaborative working between field level agents and players 5. Game changing interventions that both excite and contain field constituencies. 

CAPACITY BUILDING: What the literature tells us Dr Susan Rosina Whittle Anne Colgan Mary Rafferty