Capacity Building

This book considers specific and practical ways in which NGO's can contribute to enabling people to build on the capacities they already possess. It reviews the types of social organisation with which NGO's might consider working and the provision of training in a variety of relevant skills and activities.

Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity building efforts. The book then analyses this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back - particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

This book focuses on a gap in current social work practice theory: community change. Much work in this area of macro practice, particularly around "grassroots" community organizing, has a somewhat dated feel to it, is highly ideological in orientation, or suffers from superficiality, particularly in the area of theory and practical application. Set against the context of an often narrowly constructed "clinical" emphasis on practice education, coupled with social work's own current rendering of "scientific management," community practice often takes second or third billing in many professional curricula despite its deep roots in the overall field of social welfare. Drawing on extensive case study data from three significant community-building initiatives, program data from numerous other community capacity-building efforts, key informant interviews, and an excellent literature review, Chaskin and his colleagues draw implications for crafting community change strategies as well as for creating and sustaining the organizational infrastructure necessary to support them. The authors bring to bear the perspectives of a variety of professional disciplines including sociology, urban planning, psychology, and social work. Building Community Capacity takes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to a subject of wide and current concern: the role of neighborhood and community structures in the delivery of human services or, as the authors put it, "a place where programs and problems can be fitted together." Social work scholars and students of community practice seeking new conceptual frameworks and insights from research to inform novel community interventions will find much of value in Building Community Capacity.

Interrogates the idea of capacity building theoretically and explores the variety of meanings, constructions and practices of capacity building. This book examines capacity building in both developing and developed countries and takes the position that fragile communities are present in all societies.

In this text, the authors present current research in the study of capacity development opportunities and challenges and capacity building in education, health and capital. The topics discussed include capacity building for school improvement; unique challenges in developing capacity in rural and remote Australia; women with disabilities in urban Cambodia and vocational training; capacity building and sex workers in South-east Asia; capacity building in old industrialised regions of Europe and in non-profit organisations using blended learning as a gateway to practitioner education; and capacity development research in public health and the environment in the Caribbean.

This book integrates Western mental health approaches and international models of psychosocial capacity building within a social ecology framework, providing practitioners and volunteers with a blueprint for individual, family, group, and community interventions. Joshua L. Miller focuses on a range of disasters at local, regional, national, and international levels. Global case studies explore the social, psychological, economic, political, and cultural issues affecting various reactions to disaster and illustrate the importance of drawing on local cultural practices to promote empowerment and resiliency. Miller encourages developing people's capacity to direct their own recovery, using a social ecology framework to conceptualize disasters and their consequences. He also considers sources of vulnerability and how to support individual, family, and community resiliency; adapt and implement traditional disaster mental health interventions in different contexts; use groups and activities to facilitate recovery as part of a larger strategy of psychosocial capacity building; and foster collective grieving and memorializing. Miller's text examines the unique dynamics of intergroup conflict and the relationship between psychosocial healing, social justice, and peace and reconciliation.

The Second Edition of Building Evaluation Capacity provides 89 highly structured activities which require minimal instructor preparation and encourage application-based learning of how to design and conduct evaluation studies. Ideal for use in program evaluation courses, professional development workshops, and organization stakeholder trainings, authors Hallie Preskill and Darlene Russ-Eft cover the entire process of evaluation, including: understanding what evaluation is; the politics and ethics; the influence of culture; various models, approaches and designs; data collection and analysis methods; communicating and reporting progress and findings; and building and sustaining support. Each activity includes an overview, instructional objectives, minimum and maximum number of participants, range of time required, materials needed, primary instructional method, and procedures for facilitators to help learners in the most common evaluation practices.

A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

This book studies recent attempts to restructure maritime security sectors through capacity building. It innovates both theoretically and empirically. It proposes a new framework for understanding maritime capacity building, drawing on work in peacebuilding and security sector reform. The framework is then applied across empirical case studies from the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region written by scholars from the Global South. The WIO region is a paradigmatic case to study maritime security and capacity building in action. Countries in the region face the full gamut of maritime security challenges, while their indigenous capacities to deal with these are often weak. In consequence, the region functions as an engine of innovation for maritime capacity building more widely. The lessons and best practices from the region have importance consequences for addressing maritime security across the globe.

This book is the second collection of systematic case studies describing national environmental policies in 17 countries in terms of capacity building (see Appen dix). The OECD defines environmental capacity building as "a society's ability to identify and solve environmental problems. " While various institutions, including UNEP, FAO, World Bank and OECD, have hitherto used the terms environmental capacity and capacity building almost exclusively with reference to developing countries, we have extended the concepts to industrialized countries, as well. The first collection, edited by Martin Janicke, Helge Joergens (both Free University Berlin) and Helmut Weidner (Social Science Research Center Berlin), was pub lished in 1997 under the title "National Environmental Policies - A Comparative Study of Capacity-Building" (Berlin, etc. : Springer Verlag). It included 13 studies of countries. As in the first volume, chapter I presents the conceptual framework underlying the national case studies. It is a slightly shorter version of the corresponding chap ter in volume I. The design of all case studies in the two volumes is largely con gruent with this conceptual framework. Although the various sections of the stud ies do not always have identical titles and subtitles, the central elements of the capacity-building approach have been applied in all cases.