Challenging Capacity Building: Comparative Perspectives

The focus of most capacity building programs is on poor and disadvantaged communities. However, the appropriateness of capacity building for these groups, whether located in 'developing' or 'developed' countries, is always presented as self-evident. In much of the discussion of 'how to' build capacity, critical questions regarding the determination of whose capacities are to be built, the methods by which capacity will be built and the consequences for wider relationships of those whose capacity is being built (and presumably for those whose capacity is being left to be built at another time!) are not investigated. A deeper understanding of the meaning, practice and potential of capacity building is required. This book challenges capacity building by critically interrogating its central ideas and practices. But it also considers the way in which capacity building itself can challenge disadvantage and inequality, by offering a self-determining way forward for communities.