Capacity development: between planned interventions and emergent processes Implications for development cooperation

In recent years, the international community has been emphasising the importance of capacity development for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and sustainable development in general. The Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which took place in September 2008, produced the Accra Agenda for Action and committed signatories to taking additional steps to help develop recipient country's capacity to determine and implement their own development vision.

However, insufficient attention has been given to fully understanding how capacity develops in different organisational and societal contexts. This paper, the authors state, aims to contribute to a growing body of knowledge on capacity development.

The paper details a number of implications for aid agencies that wish to improve their support for capacity development. These include:

• Ownership is critical to any capacity development process, because change is fundamentally political. However, ownership cannot be taken for granted, and any change process is likely to be contested
  
• There is a need to approach capacity development more as a process of experimentation and learning than as the performance of predetermined activities
  
• Ensure that the design process engages local stakeholders in the determination of needs and strategies however the process should be one of joint exploration
  
• Invest more in understanding context in terms of the political, social and cultural norms and practices that shape the way a country or an organisation understands capacity, change and performance
  
• Analyse more comprehensively the nature of the change that is being demanded as a basis for defining the appropriate form of support and consider the implications for how best to engage in different levels of complexity
  
• Be prepared to accept a higher degree of risk and failure as a means of encouraging learning and innovation.

The authors conclude that there is a basic need to move away from planned interventions towards more emergent ways of working. They also assert that to what extent this can be done in practice will depend on local circumstances.