Practitioner Insights: capacity development for better results

‘Capacity development’ might well be the idiom most dear to development practitioners, on a par with ‘political economy’. So widespread its use and so broad the consensus around how ‘essential’ it is to any development project that the boundaries of its definition have become blurry. For many practitioners, capacity development refers to training local counterparts on some of the critical components of their programme. Often the choice of training content is arbitrary, consultants cherry -picking some of the elements that feel important to them, for whatever reason. Even worse, I have seen teams assuming that the mere presence of international experts working next to local government counterparts will lead to capacity development.

There has to be a better way to do capacity development. Some argue that only eight of the countries traditionally known as ‘developing’ have built strong state capability in the past 50 years, while almost half of the developing countries currently have a weak or very weak state capability. If this is correct, then international development practitioners need to take a step back and question the way we have all been doing capacity development to date.

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