Capacity Development in Practice

Alan Fowler, Jan Ubels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136532634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The international development community invests billions of dollars to improve organisational capacity. But real-life practice is poorly understood and undervalued as a distinct professional domain. Written by practitioners, this innovative publication is designed to make capacity development more professional and increasingly effective in achieving development goals.

Practical illustrations draw on experiences from the civic, government and private sectors. A central theme is to understand capacity as more than something internal to organisations. This book shows how capacity also stems from connections between different types of actor and the levels in society at which they operate.

The content is crafted for a broad audience of practitioners in capacity development: consultants, managers, front-line workers, trainers, facilitators, leaders, advisors, programme staff, activists, and funding agencies.

Published with SNV

Part I

Perspectives on Capacity

The three chapters in Part I set out a number of basic ideas, terms and concepts that help to shape our understanding of capacity. Together they give an initial answer to the question: ‘what do we deal with when we do capacity development?’

Chapter 1 is the most conceptual, in setting out two powerful frameworks for understanding capacity that are derived from hands-on experience and dedicated study. The frameworks help define different elements or capabilities on which capacity is based and also discuss how capacity comes about. Chapter 2 looks at how capacity is located within and between stakeholders in capacity-development processes. These ideas are further illustrated in Chapter 3, by means of a case showing how such capacities are embedded in different levels of human organization; these range from the individual actor, through organizations, networks and a sector to the wider societal and (supra) national systems.

Taken together, these opening chapters provide a basic definition of capacity and its dimensions. They set a foundation for looking at the ways that capacity development is actually undertaken, described in the following four parts of the volume.

1

Multiple Dimensions

Working with capacity and its development requires recognition of the many dimensions involved. This text brings together two prominent perspectives on capacity from, respectively, a South African NGO and a European-based policy centre. Both show a non-mechanical view of capacity and its development that is applied throughout this volume.

These frameworks derive from extensive practical experience and propose different, but complementary, features of what capacity is all about. They bring similar observations on the nature of capacity and the implications that this has for practice. Familiarity with both will assist practitioners’ awareness of their own understanding of capacity and what this means for their way of working. It will also enhance ‘deeper’ reading of other chapters.

The Multi-faceted Nature of Capacity: Two Leading Frameworks

Alan Fowler and Jan Ubels¹

Introduction

Experienced practitioners know that capacity has many, often confusing, faces. Pinning it down is like trying to nail a multi-coloured jelly to the wall. For example, capacity can be experienced in the confidence of staff and the organization as a whole. Looking around an office to see if members of staff are sullen and withdrawn or full of energy and curiosity can speak a lot about its underlying condition. Capacity can show in the application of well-crafted expertise, procedures or skills. Spontaneous, external demands on an organization for advice can signal peer recognition of its competencies. Capacity can radiate in the quality of achievements and relations and reputations with clients and others. This chapter therefore gets to grips with the ‘multi-dimensional’ nature of capacity and what this means for its development. Doing so requires making choices between the array of ideas, concepts, stories, frameworks and practices on offer.

Our decision to describe the landscape of capacity and its development through two particular frameworks stems from a number of criteria. A first point for selection is that any ‘framework’ – a coherent set of features and a story which makes capacity understandable – must have its foundation in reflections on experience across many contexts and over time. Second, it needs to be supported by and contribute to the wider literature on the topic. Third, the framework is popular with and used by practitioners. Finally, it makes experiential sense to us and to the approach of authors agreeing to contribute to the volume. This filter focused our selection onto two frameworks, with different origins in terms of time period of ‘discovery’ and their international recognition (Kaplan, 1999; Baser and Morgan, 2008). The two draw on the governmental and non-governmental domains in society, operating at different scales within and across nation states. We are convinced that familiarity with both will benefit practitioners in their work as well as the professional development of the field as a whole.

The first perspective was developed in the early 1990s by Allan Kaplan and his colleagues at the Community Development Resource Association (CDRA), a South African non-governmental organization (NGO). With a special mix of experience in the anti-apartheid struggle and an anthroposophic philosophy, the CDRA team developed fundamental interpretations of what capacity is about. Developing capacity is explained through six inter-related elements. In doing so, an important distinction is made between elements that are tangible and those that are not. For more than ten years, this work has provided a valuable and enduring professional influence within, and increasingly beyond, the community of NGOs.

Alongside is an evolving framework for capacity and its development formulated recently by the Netherlands-based European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM). This centre aims to build effective partnerships between the European Union and Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP), particularly related to development cooperation. ECDPM is renowned for its exploratory contributions and constructive roles in the early days of the ‘capacity development’ discussion in the donor world. One example is initiating the magazine Capacity.org. The Centre has focused especially on multilateral and bilateral development aid. In 2007 it completed a study for members of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD-DAC) and other organizations. Building on earlier work based on original case studies and complementary papers, amongst advances on other themes and discussion topics – such as accountability and ownership – ECDPM developed the ‘five capabilities’ (5Cs) framework for both understanding and evaluating capacity.² The 5Cs framework is now being applied in many areas, for example in evaluation and learning from capacity development programmes.³

At first sight, the frameworks appear as alternatives. In some superficial ways they are. But they also share a deeper grounding. They are both developed on the basis of reflection on a considerable amount of practical experience and reveal the ‘multi-faceted’ nature of capacity. In both, capacity is a label for the uncertain results of interaction between what are referred to as elements in one and as capabilities in the other. In other words, capacity is not a specific substance but is an ‘emergent’ property based on the combination of a number of elements. In seeing capacity as ‘living’ and dynamic, they draw attention to the fact that understanding capacity means looking beyond measuring results only. They also illustrate the importance of clarity about the mental image that a practitioner brings to his or her work. These and other similarities are revisited in the conclusions. The immediate task is to introduce both frameworks in terms used by the authors.

CDRA: The Development of Capacity

Here is the view on capacity that Allan Kaplan of CDRA set out in a 1999 United Nations publication, ‘Organisational Capacity: A different perspective’. Mainly retaining wording from the author, the indented text is extracted and edited from the original. The selection concentrates on the characteristics of capacity and does not include, for example, explanations of stages of organizational evolution also covered in his publication. It begins with an identification of organizational elements, moves on to the issue of ‘invisibility’ and then homes in on the significance of treating organizations as complex open systems, where the whole adds up to ‘more than the sum of the parts’.

Elements of Capacity

Context and Conceptual Framework: The first requirement for an organization with capacity, the ‘prerequisite’ on which all other capacity is built, is the development of a conceptual framework which reflects the organization’s understanding of its world. This is a coherent frame of reference, a set of concepts which allows the organization to make sense of the world around it, to locate itself within that world, and to make decisions in relation to it.

Understanding context is accompanied by a particular organizational ‘attitude’ towards that context. An organization needs to build its confidence to act in and on the world in a way that it believes can be effective and have an impact. It has to believe in its own capacity to affect its circumstances, allied to an acceptance of responsibility for the social and physical conditions ‘out there’.

Vision: With clarity of understanding and a sense of confidence comes the possibility of developing organizational vision. There is a reality out there which must be responded to, and there is an inner inspiration that must be harnessed and focused. No two organizations will choose to respond to the same external situation in the same way. Every organization must get in touch with its own driving force. To be most effective, it must identify its own particular abilities and strengths in order to focus on the possibilities of its unique contribution. Interaction between understanding of particular context and appreciation of particular responsibility yields organizational vision.

Strategy: Organizational vision yields an understanding of what the organization intends to do; strategy is a translation into how the organization intends to realize its vision. Strategy entails the development of, as well as designing the organization around, particular methodologies of practice, with adaptation to particular circumstances. Strategic thinking involves prioritizing certain activities and approaches over others as well as marshalling and coordinating scarce resources in the service of chosen priorities.

Strategy is achieved through the constant interplay between doing, planning and evaluation. It has both to see what works and what does not work as well as to reflect in depth about what it means by its discernible impact, and what – perhaps unforeseen – consequences this impact releases. Given such evaluation, it has to rethink, re-plan, re-strategize; improve and adapt its methodology as well as its understanding of its context, its vision, and its relationships with others.

Culture: An important dimension of organizational attitude is that of culture. By culture we understand the norms and values which are practised in an organization; the way of life; the way things are done. Without changing culture, other changes are likely to be short-lived and ineffectual. Many of the cultural aspects of organizations exist and operate unconsciously: what people say they value and believe in and what is practised in the organization are often very different.

Over time every organization will develop particular ways of doing things – habits, norms, routines, mindsets. They become unconscious. The organization loses awareness of them and they begin to exert a tremendous power and force precisely because they become hidden. The organization that makes them conscious, however, which becomes aware of its own dynamics, and makes its values transparent and collective, is able to use that power as a source of liberation, creativity and energy.

Structure: Although these elements are not gained entirely sequentially, once organizational aims, strategy and culture are clear it becomes possible to structure the organization in such a way that roles and functions are clearly defined and differentiated, lines of communication and accountability untangled, and decision-making procedures transparent and functional. Put slightly differently, ‘form follows function’ – if one tries to do this the other way around the organization becomes incapacitated.

Too many attempts to intervene in organizational functioning take structure and procedure as their starting point, partly because this element is easily observable, partly because it can be more directly accessed and manipulated, and partly because it seems to be the cause of so much malfunctioning.

Skills: The next step in the march towards organizational capacity, in terms of priority and sequence, is the growth and extension of individual skills, abilities and competencies – the traditional terrain of training courses. Yet what emerges clearly from extensive experience is that there is a sequence, a hierarchy, an order. Unless organizational capacity has been developed sufficiently to harness training and the acquisition of new skills, training courses do not ‘take’, and skills do not adhere. The organization that does not know where it is going and why; which has a poorly developed sense of responsibility for itself; and which is inadequately structured, cannot make use of training courses and skills acquisition.

Material resources: Finally, an organization needs material resources: finances, equipment, office space, and so on. Without an appropriate level of these, the organization will always remain, in an important sense, incapacitated. Once again it is worthwhile to note the common misunderstanding displayed by incapacitated organizations – the thought that they would become capacitated if only they had access to sufficient material resources. Yet experience has shown that, by and large, those organizations that complain about their lack of material resources, and which attribute their failures to this organizational feature, lack the ability to counter these problems, while those organizations that accept their own incapacities and attempt to remedy them gain the ability to overcome or compensate for outer constraints.

Though written with an eye on the development of NGOs, readers will recognize this logic in relation to a variety of models that distinguish organizational ‘sub-systems’. Examples are: Henry Mintzberg’s Structure in Fives, the ‘seven S-s’ and other organizational and capacity frameworks that have been promoted and employed over the years.

The Visible and Invisible Nature of Capacity

A special quality of the CDRA work is its recognition of the ‘integrity’ of the organizational organism, and a certain degree of hierarchy in the sub-syste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• A Resource Volume on Capacity Development
• Part I: Perspectives on Capacity
• Part II: Establishing your Practice
• Part III: Working with Connections
• Part IV: Improving on Results
• Part V: Looking Ahead
• Index