Despite being on the agenda for decades, evaluations show that sustainable capacity development remains one of the most challenging areas of international development practice. What lessons have been learned? How can good practice become common practice? This paper from the Development Assistance Committee synthesises the importance of capacity and the mixed record in achieving results. Supporting capacity development requires context-specific and in-depth understanding of existing capacities at the individual, institutional and societal levels.
Capacity is the ability of people, organisations and societies to manage their affairs. Both donors and partner countries have underestimated the complexity of the capacity development challenge. Even when capacity development is an explicit goal of programmes, insufficient attention is given to how it can be achieved. About a quarter of donor aid has gone into ‘technical co-operation’, the majority of which was ostensibly aimed at capacity development. Capacity development is critical because weak institutions and under-skilled individuals are often central to the failure of development efforts. Capacity is itself an important outcome to achieve sustainable development, as well as an instrument of development.
Until recently, donors and partner countries viewed capacity development as a technical process, or a transfer of knowledge or institutions from North to South.
- Many efforts have focused on training or on providing technical advisors.
- Donors have imposed monitoring requirements that have inadvertently undermined country-led strategies, local monitoring and accountability practices.
- Many of these efforts have lacked a medium-term results framework to monitor progress or impact.
- Donors have failed to recognize the critical importance of country ownership and leadership, or consider the broader political context.
- Donors have imposed organisational solutions, including parallel structures such as project implementation units that often damage longer-term capacity and institutional development.
Donors and partner countries are beginning to define a clearer framework for support. Capacity development involves long-term and complex adaptation, learning, and social transformation. A set of empirically based good practices and refocused approaches is emerging, in line with the key messages on ownership, alignment and harmonization that form the backbone of the Paris Declaration of 2005.
- The experience of the past five decades shows the need to align behind and support country-driven approaches and systems of development emphasising local ownership, wide participation, transparency and clear accountability.
- The highly political nature of capacity building must be recognised. Technical approaches and imported fixes fail because they do not take account of the political environment.
- There is a need for a more sophisticated understanding of incentives, motivation and leadership, as well as organisational and institutional environments, both formal and informal.
- Donors are harmonising their approaches and recognising the importance of fine tuning existing processes rather than creating new frameworks or approaches.
- Donors are increasingly focusing on building political capabilities. This extends beyond supporting formal institutions of representation, accountability and administration, including civil society and the private sector.
