Paper short abstract:

Capacity building lies at the heart of much development work yet is poorly theorised – often reduced to training or equipment supply. Drawing on research from eight conflict-affected countries this paper critiques existing approaches to capacity building and suggests elements of a smarter approach.

Paper long abstract:

Capacity building lies at the heart of much development work yet remains poorly theorised in practice. Too often, capacity building is reduced to training programmes or equipment supply, crowding out more creative development methods. Drawing on research investigating how capacity building has been approached across eight post-conflict and conflict-affected countries, this paper argues that capacity building is operationalised in a narrow manner, focused on technical knowledge and tangible outputs that ignore the capacity of systems, the human face of service delivery, the plurality of the health system and the complexity of seemingly simple change processes.

What is needed is a smarter model of capacity building that is people-centred and systematically aware. Three changes to current approaches are suggested. First, capacity building should pay closer attention to the intangible dimensions of capacity, including state-society relations. Public perceptions of the quality of a service matter as much as its 'objective quality'. When people have little confidence in the capacity of a provider to deliver, they are unlikely to use that service. Second, capacity building should engage with how people actually use services. Donors tend to focus on state systems to the detriment of the plurality of providers that people actually use. Finally, donors need to lose the modular approach to capacity building, which attempts to improve the performance of discrete organisations and individuals in the hope that this will 'aggregate up' into stronger systems. Support should not only target the units within a system but also the connections between them.