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Editorial, volume 6, number 1
'Capacity-building' is rapidly becoming just another slogan in the development lexicon -- a catch-all term to be crammed into our 'mental baggage', a term which has already become mis-shapen and threadbare through over-use. Like 'empowerment' and 'sustainable development' before it, capacity-building is assumed to be at all times, and in all places, a good thing. Everyone -- from the World Bank official to the human rights campaigner or the local industrialist -- can line up behind its commonsensical appeal. Bricks-and-mortar projects and political mobilisation become, at a rhetorical stroke, different points along the same spectrum.
Many view 'capacity-building' as offering short-cuts on the bumpy road to development. In fact, some NGOs now describe their own organisational development as 'capacity-building'. This may reflect a sincere belief that increasing their own strength will improve their ability to contribute to social change. However, the whole process risks becoming an end in itself, an exercise in self-absorption. As Alan Fowler suggests in this issue, the fashion may in fact be prompted by the realities of financial dependence, in an increasingly competitive environment. Indeed, what passes for capacity-building may in practice amount to little more than learning how to dance to the donors' tune -- the routines and steps essential for continued support from the leading 'partner'.
This is hardly surprising. After all, for any organisation to survive, it must have the capacity to generate resources. But if capacity-building becomes a process whereby those with power grant favours only to those who imitate their chosen methods and systems, it becomes a cynical joke. In the context of donor agencies, 'capacity-building' can easily become a means of imposing (albeit unwittingly) a set of organisational or cultural norms on local counterparts. If the donor opts for one management approach, one appraisal method, or one evaluation framework, it is only a matter of time before its dependants either follow suit -- perhaps with 'capacity-building' workshops to provide training in how to do so -- or are dropped from the portfolio, at least for the time being.
Humility is crucial in the fields of development and humanitarian assistance, where the prominent players all claim the moral high ground, and justify their work on behalf of people living in situations that differ greatly from their own -- and about whom, as Alison Joyner shows, their assumptions may be flawed. Before invoking 'capacity-building' as a cure for all organisational and developmental ills, we need to ask a number of questions. Whose capacities do we want to build, and whose may we be overlooking, or undermining? Why these capacities and not others? Who says what is enough? And to whom are those who make decisions accountable for the processes that flow from these? Before leaping in to build their capacities, we need to clarify the different roles and functions of competing interest groups, people's representative organisations, and the growing number of institutions that, in various ways, intervene in their lives!
Human capacity-building (as opposed to institutional development in a narrow sense) is concerned with expanding our field of influence, such that we can more effectively shape the processes affecting us, and contribute to the wider well-being of our society. It is thus centrally linked to participation and empowerment. But the ways in which individuals and groups exercise choice, given the scope to do so, may not conform to expectations. Sarah White shows that participation in development may have a range of meanings which differ from those that are assumed. Specific forms of participation (or non-participation) may be misunderstood or denied, or re-interpreted as subversion, indifference, or even failure by the very agencies that prize capacity-building so highly. Teresa Cresswell describes her use of a popular set of techniques (which she calls 'participatory rapid appraisal') to elicit the concerns of people living and working in neglected urban districts in the United Kingdom. Here, the capacities in question are analytical as well as social and material: people needed the means by which to articulate their situation, and to take action to change it. For this process to be worthwhile, the essential ingredients are seen to be time, commitment, and the ability to overcome setbacks. It is precisely these, argues Stephen Heyns, that are sacrificed when agencies follow the trend of replacing development work with discrete, one-off consultancies.
Fiona Leach explores a vital aspect of capacity-building -- education and training -- for women in the informal sector. She shows that such efforts often depend on isolating people from their gendered social context, and so are condemned to failure. To take capacity-building seriously means understanding the nature of the (changing) constraints operating on different sets of people -- by virtue of gender relations, cultural or ethnic identity, age, physical condition, economic status, or other critical variables. Failure to do this can mean that nobody really benefits from a particular intervention, or (worse) that new layers of privilege place the weakest even further from access to the levers of change. Roger Zetter looks at the subject in the context of institutions, examining the relationships between international donor agencies, in-country NGOs, and the intended beneficiaries -- in this case, Mozambican refugees in Malawi. Donors (individually and collectively) exercise considerable de facto power in deciding which counterpart institutions will survive and which will fall by the wayside; whose capacities will be strengthened, and whose will be left under-developed. This is not a simple case of institutional Darwinism, nor of Machiavellian scheming, but one where many small decisions by outsiders combine to produce a complex set of impacts -- the long-term consequences of which individual decision-makers may know or care little about, and for which they are in any case scarcely accountable.
Looking at capacity-building in the context of human resource development, Deborah Hope Kasente looks at university-based gender studies and gender-training programmes in Africa, and their impact on the ground. One problem is that many fashionable analytical methods are themselves either poorly understood, or are misapplied or inappropriate to the local context. Rather than encouraging indigenous potential, she fears that such courses may serve to reproduce the shortcomings of the imported models. Babar Mumtaz argues that urban planning in developing countries has been detrimentally influenced by academic approaches that evolved in industrialised countries during the post-1945 period, and that new approaches to in-service training are needed. Michel Chossudovsky assesses the agenda for women's empowerment put forward by the World Bank at the 1995 International Women's Conference, one that profoundly affects policy formulation and decision-making at many government and non-governmental levels. Diana Rosenberg, reporting on research into the situation of university libraries in Africa, reveals the extent to which these rely on international donors -- a dependence that is often not only financial, but also cultural and intellectual.
Finally, Michael Edwards, writing for the British Development Studies Association, proposes a code of conduct to guide relations between academic researchers and NGOs. Mutual respect for their different purposes is, he argues, the only way to ensure harmonious collaboration. In other words, there are distinct ways of knowing things, and different ways of acquiring and acting on such knowledge.
This takes us back to the central theme of this issue of Development in Practice, which is that genuine capacity-building is not about promoting homogeneity, or uniform adherence to organisational structures or plans. Rather, it is about recognising that, while it will result in a challenge to the status quo, diversity is by far the more desirable outcome.
Deborah Eade
Oxfam (UK and Ireland)
February 1996
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