The Paris Framework for Climate Change Capacity Building

Mizan R Khan, J. Timmons Roberts, Saleemul Huq, Victoria Hoffmeister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351715317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

The Paris Framework for Climate Change Capacity Building pioneers a new era of climate change governance, performing the foundational job of clarifying what is meant by the often ad-hoc, one-off, uncoordinated, ineffective and unsustainable practices of the past decade described as 'capacity building' to address climate change. As an alternative, this book presents a framework on how to build effective and sustainable capacity systems to meaningfully tackle this long-term problem. Such a reframing of capacity building itself requires means of implementation. The authors combine their decades-long experiences in climate negotiations, developing climate solutions, climate activism and peer-reviewed research to chart a realistic roadmap for the implementation of this alternative framework for capacity building. As a result, this book convincingly makes the case that universities, as the highest and sustainable seats of learning and research in the developing countries, should be the central hub of capacity building there.

This will be a valuable resource for students, researchers and policy-makers in the areas of climate change and environmental studies.

1 ‘Puzzling, confusing, and … vacuous’

Capacity building from the World Bank to climate governance

Introduction

2016 was the warmest year on record. As was 2015. And 2014. Heated by political fire and extreme weather events, 2017 marks a shift in global approaches to the changing climate. The inauguration of Donald Trump, with his public climate denial and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, signalled a shift in climate action and diplomacy.

The Paris Agreement, adopted in November 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) marks a vital act in climate change diplomacy. The framework for the implementation of the Paris Agreement was established at the 22nd COP, held in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2016. This was unexpected, when the timeframe for its implementation was put as 2020 – four years later. This shifted the agendas for the following Conferences of the Parties into the ‘implementation COPs’, to work out what the Paris Agreement really means and how it will actually work. Such a rapid entry into force of the Paris Agreement adds momentum to the global community’s efforts to build a zero-carbon, climate-resilient future. Now Parties must adopt procedures for operationalizing the new frameworks, institutions and processes established under the Paris Agreement, and there are many. These include building an ‘Enhanced Transparency Framework’ to see how countries are doing in reducing emissions (mitigation). It includes sorting out the complex systems for delivering finance to help developing countries deal with climate change. Crucial will be a ‘global stocktake’ every five years to assess how countries are doing, and building a 12-member compliance mechanism to which Parties can agree. A clearinghouse for risk transfer and insurance will need to be established, a task force will be set up to devise integrated approaches to deal with climate-induced displacement, and a new market mechanism and a global sustainable development mechanism must be created (Dagnet et al. 2016).

All these initiatives will take collaboration and focus through dozens of major and minor meetings of experts and negotiators. But one area of work has been barely discussed: the need to follow through on promises made by the UNFCCC Paris Committee on Capacity Building, adopt a five-year work plan, and develop the Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT). The Paris Agreement’s decisions to establish the Paris Committee on Capacity Building under Article 11, create the CBIT under Article 13, and in between, to stipulate in Article 12 that countries will promote education, training and public awareness in dealing with climate change, can be regarded as foundational for all the other institutions, mechanisms and processes. To achieve a low-carbon, climate-resilient world, capacity building to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to its increasing impacts in an open and transparent matter, as stated in the Paris Agreement, is of central importance to facilitate the implementation of all the other provisions and decisions.

This is especially true for the nano-emitters, the least developed countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS), who are collectively regarded as the particularly vulnerable countries (PVCs), which have been hit first and hardest by the increasing impacts of climate change and have the least capacity to adapt. Subsequent sections of the chapter will explain the salience and argument of the book – why capacity building is important for addressing climate change and how it can be done on a long-term, sustainable basis. We begin by tracing how the concept of capacity building has evolved in the domain of international development cooperation, and then turn to how it is being thought of in humanity’s response to climate change. We end this brief introductory chapter with a roadmap for the rest of the book.

A child of the World Bank: where the category of ‘capacity building’ came from

Looking at the evolution of international development cooperation since the 1950s, capacity building can be said to have its precursor in the concepts of ‘institution building’, ‘institutional strengthening’, ‘human resource development’, ‘institutional economics’, etc. (Morgan 2006; Kuhl 2009; Keijzer & Janus 2014). Based on the experience of the US-led Marshall Plan to rebuild war-ravaged Europe after the Second World War, the USA and the European countries believed that development could be best pursued in newly decolonized developing countries by building and strengthening their national institutions. But social engineering proved a much more complex phenomenon than physics and mechanics, particularly before and in the initial stage of capitalist development, so thinking began to change. The concept of ‘institutional economics’ soon evolved as a response to dissatisfaction with traditional technical cooperation, where development of local human capital was not the focus (Thorbecke 2000). The new discipline of ‘institutional economics’ tried to establish the idea of institution building with some theoretical underpinnings (Booth 2011; Hilderbrand 2002). The argument was that differences in economic growth and development among developing countries can be explained by the differing quality of the institutions responsible for economic management. But the relevance of politics to institutional change remained unappreciated by the aid agencies, thus, as Shirley argued, the new institutional economics was not good news for development assistance (2008: 76).

The concepts of ‘capacity development’ and ‘capacity building’ have a relatively weak intellectual pedigree within development theory. Capacity development and capacity building may be regarded as an amalgamation of various precursor concepts, including ‘institution building’, ‘institutional strengthening’, ‘human resource development’, ‘organizational development’, ‘community development’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘institutional economics’, among others (Lusthaus et al. 1999; Morgan 2006; Kuhl 2009; Keijzer & Janus 2014). Due to capacity building’s evolution as a blend of precursors, different disciplines employ a ‘wide range of implicit mental frameworks about capacity’, various relevant actors hold diverse perspectives on capacity building work, and there exists ‘no broadly accepted definition’ of the concept (Morgan 2006). The lack of widely accepted definitional boundaries on ‘capacity’ has led capacity development to be regarded as an ‘umbrella concept’ (Morgan 1998) that can be used to link ‘previously isolated approaches to a coherent strategy with a long-term perspective and vision of social change’ (Lusthaus et al. 1999).

The nature of ‘capacity development’ as a catch-all term has proved to be both advantageous as an ‘integrating force that brings together a large number of stakeholders’, as well as disciplines and aid objectives, and disadvantageous due to the danger of the concept being ‘used as a slogan rather than as a term for rigorous development work’ (ibid.). As approaches to nation-building ranging ‘from the macro and the abstract … to the micro and the operational’ may currently be packaged and legitimized as capacity development by donors and civil society organizations and thereby garner broad-based support, there has been little movement among these actors to make the concept of capacity any less ‘puzzling, confusing, and … vacuous’ (Morgan 2006).

Examples of different organizations’ own definitions of capacity development may aid in illustrating how capacity can be broadly understood and stretched to back a wide variety of aid initiatives. Definitions employed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Canadian, German, and American development agencies are provided in Table 1.1.

Across the many definitions, there appears consensus that capacity building should be driven by local demands and contribute to sustainable development of institutions and societies. However, aside from these broad similarities, it seems that various perspectives on capacity building are simultaneously being employed (Lusthaus et al. 1999). One useful system for grouping these different approaches to capacity building, proposed by Lusthaus, applies the categories of organizational, institutional, systems, and participatory-process definitions. Organizational approaches to capacity development see ‘an entity, organization or even set of organizations as the key to development’ and therefore focus on the capacities of organizations, such as governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and community organizations. Institutional approaches, inspired by institutional economics, understand institutions as ‘the formal and informal “rules of the game”’ and concentrate on building ‘the capacity to create, change, enforce, and learn from the processes and rules that govern society’. Systems approaches regard capacity building as ‘a complex intervention that encompasses multiple levels and actors, power relationships and linkages’ and suggest that capacity development should not create new systems, but should ‘build on what exists in order to improve it’. Finally, participatory-process approaches emphasize the importance of undertaking capacity development within a ‘participatory, empowering partnership for which those involved feel a high degree of ownership’ (ibid.).

Table 1.1 Definitions of capacity development by selected development agencies

Agency	Definition
UNDP	Capacity development: ‘the process through which individuals, organizations, institutions and societies develop abilities to perform functions, solve problems and set and achieve objectives’ (UNDP 2006)
World Bank	Capacity development: ‘A locally driven process of transformational learning by leaders, coalitions and other agents that leads to actions that support changes in institutional capacity areas – ownership, policy, and organizational – to advance development goals’ (World Bank)
OECD	Capacity development: ‘The process by which individuals, groups and organisations, institutions and countries develop, enhance and organise their systems, resources and knowledge; all reflected in their abilities, individually and collectively, to perform functions, solve problems and achieve objectives’ (OECD 2006)
CIDA	Capacity building: ‘A process by which individuals, groups, institutions, organizations, and societies enhance their abilities to identify and meet development challenges in a sustainable manner’ (CIDA 1996, in Lusthaus et al. 1999)
GIZ	Capacity development: ‘The self-driven process through which people, organizations and companies mobilize and build out their capabilities in order to achieve capacity’ (GIZ, translation)
USAID	Capacity building: ‘An on-going evidence-driven process to improve the ability of an individual, team, organization, network, sector or community to create measureable and sustainable results’ in terms of effectively ‘apply[ing] its skills, assets and resources to achieve its goals’ (USAID 2012)

In 1998, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) consultant Peter Morgan cogently argued that ‘capacity building is a risky, murky, messy business, with unpredictable and unquantifiable outcomes, uncertain methodologies, contested objectives, many unintended consequences, little credit to its champions and long time lags’. In 2006, he began a study on capacity with the anonymous quote ‘I can’t define capacity, but I know it when I see it.’ Both statements continue to characterize modern approaches to capacity: it remains a hazily defined goal that all actors can agree is important, but more specific formulations of the boundaries, methodologies, and objectives of capacity building remain deficient or even contradictory.

Capacity first emerged as a prominent concept within international relations with the Marshall Plan, under which the United States endeavoured to rebuild war-ravaged Europe after the Second World War. During this period, and increasingly as the Cold War escalated, the USA and various European nations understood efforts to build and strengthen developing countries’ national institutions, especially within newly decolonized nations, as important to shore up political stability. The approach to capacity development as an integral aspect of international security was exemplified by the Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, which pledged American aid to any democratic nation threatened with ‘internal or external authoritarian forces’ (U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian n.d.).

In the 1950s, development cooperation by industrialized countries was characterized by an ‘industrialization-first’, technical assistance-focused strategy with little soft technology transfer. In this period, industrialization was regarded ‘as the engine of growth which would pull the rest of the economy along behind it’, and development aid therefore consisted largely of investment in ‘industrial activities and social overhead projects’ (Thorbecke 2000). Accordingly, ‘economic growth became the main policy objective’ of development cooperation and gross national product (GNP) growth was adopted as ‘both the objective and the yardstick of development’ (ibid.).

From the 1960s till the 1980s, the aim of strengthening institutions and building human capital replaced GNP growth as the primary objective of development aid. This shift in focus towards institutional capacities and human capital evolved in response to the failures of GNP-oriented development strategies to cope with emergent problems, including unemployment, unequal income distributions, high poverty rates, growing urban congestion, and foreign indebtedness, as well as the increasing prominence of endogenous growth theories (ibid.). The emergent governing discipline, based on the endogenous growth school, identified ‘low human capital endowment as the primary obstacle to the achievement of the potential scale economies that might come about through industrialization’ and therefore prioritized allocation of resources to research and development activities and spillovers of know-how from one firm or industry to others (ibid.).

Another new framework for the development process that rose to prominence in the 1980s and contributed to the modern understanding of capacity building was new institutional economics, based on the concept that ‘appropriate institutions and rules of the game are essential to provide pro-development and anti-corruption incentives’ (ibid.). Under this framework, differences in economic growth and development among developing countries are attributed to discrepancies in the quality of institutions responsible for economic management. New institutional economics, however, was prone to concentrate on the technical and mechanical aspects of institutional change at the expense of nuanced considerations of political conditions and other local circumstances (Shirley 2008).

Out of the endogenous growth and new institutional economics paradigms dominant in the 1980s emerged the concept of capacity development/capacity building, which became ‘the buzzword of development in the 1990s’ (OECD 2006). The World Bank is regarded as the initiator of this concept, although other development agencies later started employing the term ‘capacity development’. Some commentators find no basic difference between these two terms (Vincent-Lancrin 2007), while others argue that there is: capacity building starts from scratch, while capacity development is a process beginning from an existing base (Kuhl 2009; Pearson 2011a).

Drawing on the endogenous growth school, capacity building emphasized ‘the need to build development on indigenous resources, ownership and leadership and by bringing human resources development to the fore’ (OECD 2006). Simultaneously, the collapse of the Soviet influence in Europe and Asia and the ‘sluggish response to the first generation of economic reforms in Africa’ underscored the importance of institution...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 ‘Puzzling, confusing, and … vacuous’: capacity building from the World Bank to climate governance
• 2 The meagre history and politics of capacity building under the UNFCCC
• 3 Has it worked elsewhere? Capacity-building efforts in development and environmental regimes
• 4 Needed: a capacity-building framework that’s up to the task
• 5 Case studies of capacity building in Bangladesh, Uganda and Jamaica
• 6 Lessons learned from agency initiatives on capacity building
• 7 Universities as the central hub of capacity building
• 8 Capacity building and transparency under Paris
• 9 Conclusion: implementing the Paris framework on capacity building
• Index