Publications

A capability statement concerning our work on Agricultural and Forest products in Asia.

Démarche méthodologique pour la formulation de projets.

In June 2010 SNV, together with IFAD, organised a conference on ‘brokering knowledge for upscaling best practices in Inclusive Markets Access in East & Southern Africa’, which brought together over 70 participants from 11 African countries from donor, public and private sector to share experiences. This report summarizes the main issues discussed during the conference, of which the main focus was seeking to bring about systemic change for larger-scale sustainable inclusive markets with a wider significance.

Capacity development is increasingly seen as the sine qua non sine qua non of successful development. Yet despite the growing commitment to show results, documented examples of its impact are hard to find. This paper went in search of available evidence and reviewed 29 case studies of capacity development from three development organisations. Its conclusion is that development organisations and donors need to move away from their narrow focus on accountability to a broader focus on mutual learning. They should also stop looking for the perfect measurement policy and start measuring instead.

This paper explores the construction of a sustainable and culturally appropriate model of indigenous territorial management through the case study of the experiences of the ‘Chiquitania’ region in Boliva and the role of SNV in this. Sharing these experiences should provide some guidelines for the construction of territorial management models in different cultural contexts.

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.
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Be it water out of a new tap or the practice of good governance, development is the product of relationships between stakeholders. Capacity exists not only within but also between them. Capacity and its development are therefore ‘relational’. This text by Jim Woodhill introduces multi-actor dimensions of capacity. He discusses features of the actors that are commonly found in aided development and then explores dimensions of working with relations between them. The chapter introduces an interesting model of three types of ‘relating’, then provides the reader with principles and approaches that can be applied to make engagement between multiple stakeholders more effective.

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For capacity to develop effectively one often has to work across different levels of human organizing. One may, for example, have to deal with capabilities of the individual, the organization, a network of actors and sector or national institutions. Another way of distinguishing levels is geographic or administrative units: communities (micro), districts and/or provinces (meso) and nation state (macro). This chapter by Hendrik Visser discusses the real-life example of a capacity development initiative in road construction that consciously worked across both types of level. The story illustrates how additional capabilities were needed and developed at each level to achieve effective and sustainable results. The practitioner will find lessons on deliberately working with the ‘multi-level’ nature of capacity and implications for the place and role of change teams or advisers.

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Both external advisers and internal change agents can choose very different roles in capacity-development processes. Over the duration of an assignment or project, a competent adviser takes on a variety of positions in relation to different people or parts of the client system. This demands a critical awareness of types of roles and judgements about what is needed when. In their article originally published in Training and Development journal February 1990, Champion, Kiel and McLendon identify nine possible roles and suggest key factors to consider in making judgements about which consulting role to take on. Their model helps advisers, change agents or consultants to improve the clarity of expectations between themselves and their clients. The article also explores factors that consultants may consider when adjusting their role towards a particular situation or phase of a project. Though it was written 20 years ago and not specifically targeted at the development community, this text is still highly relevant and addresses questions that will be very familiar to practitioners.

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To be effective in capacity development one often has to combine specific knowledge of the client business with change expertise. This combination of capabilities seldom arises naturally from formal education. Gaining and holding the required balance therefore calls for conscious and continuous effort on the part of practitioners as well as the organizations they work for. This chapter by Naa-Aku Acquaye-Baddoo analyses how these two different capabilities interact in practice, based on the experience of one development organization. In an engaging style, she explores how practitioners could improve their ability to combine the two in a balanced way and what organizational conditions help enable them to do so.

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Capacity-development practitioners commonly find themselves in work settings where different forces, interests and power asymmetries need to be dealt with. These factors can create potential sources of conflict over ownership, authority and the allocation of roles and responsibilities. This problem is poorly acknowledged and seldom explored in ways that are useful for practitioners. This chapter by Joe McMahon draws upon work from the fields of consulting, facilitation and conflict resolution to expose the power dimensions that are inherent to capacity development. He delineates a number of practical, common-sense ‘behavioural guides’ for the practitioner that will help to adequately define one’s own role, position oneself towards multiple actors and constructively deal with (potential) conflict.

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The diverse actors engaged in a capacity-development process often have very different values and views. The fact that it is the dominant values and voices that determine the direction and outcomes of the process is a particularly pertinent issue in addressing exclusion and inequity. Drawing on two local settings in India, this text by Rajesh Tandon demonstrates how some of these issues are played out in capacity-development processes. He highlights the need for a practitioner to be fully aware of how imbalances in interests and voice may reinforce or even worsen existing situations of disempowerment. He also discusses how a lack of awareness of a gap between the practitioner’s own values and those of the client, or key stakeholders, can impact on the practitioner’s relationship with his or her client.

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The professional field of organizational development (OD) is a major source for thinking about and practising capacity development. Capacity-development (CD) practitioners will therefore benefit from a good understanding of this rather eclectic discipline. In her insightful contribution, Ingrid Richter traces the evolution of OD and describes the multiple influences that have shaped it. She draws on her own experience and that of other OD practitioners to show how much convergence there is between OD and CD practice, especially with regard to approaches and methods for supporting long-term change. This convergence is a growing resource for the work of CD advisers. Practitioners will find this chapter illuminating in locating the roots of some capacity-development practices and approaches with which they may be familiar.

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Advisers or change agents always enter and intervene in living dynamic processes. Accordingly, a critical competence is the ability to see and make sense of what is going on in and around a client organization. Organizational assessments are one way of doing this, but they often focus on predefined and rather standard elements of an organization. A different but complementary approach is what is called ‘reading situations’, that is, to try to discover the story and dynamics of an organization in a more open and creative way. This chapter by Catherine Collingwood describes how to ‘read an organization’, with a special focus on understanding the less-visible dynamics that occur within civil society organizations and their contexts. This exploration reveals the limitations of conventional organizational assessment approaches, leading to the conclusion that these may be complemented by ‘readings’ to unravel the unique context and history of an organization. Finally, Collingwood considers what this approach may mean for practitioners wanting to apply it across different types of organizational settings.

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Dialogue is an essential ingredient of any intervention directed at changing a situation and is a vital competence for any adviser. While it is not easy to facilitate true dialogue, it is a capability that can be developed in its own right. Real dialogue can create collectively shared and owned understanding and an agreed direction of effort as well as clarity about divisions of tasks and responsibilities. This chapter by Marianne Mille Bojer reviews factors critical to the success of capacity-development processes that use dialogue as a key philosophy. Her excellent menu of dialogue tools and approaches shows the reader what is on offer and how to choose between them. She also provides concrete examples of how some of these methods have been used.

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Any capacity-development activity takes place within the wider setting of institutions, governance and politics. This reality poses for practitioners critical and difficult questions that are too seldom confronted in the open. For example: how can one best tackle the complex webs of power and informal relations that surround organizations? How does capacity development relate to governance dynamics? How can one explore, and maybe even widen the space for capacity development by working with ‘political’ forces and factors? Traditionally, most attention is directed at capacity development from the ‘inside out’. In this compelling contribution, Nils Boesen shows that a focus on governance and stakeholders opens additional perspectives on how change can be and often is stimulated from the ‘outside in’, or demand-side. He also discusses the political dimensions that shape capacity and the importance of change management – particularly the political tasks that it entails – is stressed.

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Being held to account is a driver for performance and capacity development. However, accountability to local constituencies is often weak in many ‘aided-development’ programmes, with negative consequences for results and the ownership of such programmes by their intended beneficiaries. Increasing mutual and public accountability can therefore be an important force for enhancing the overall performance of actors around an issue of collective concern. In this chapter, Rakesh Rajani sketches various ways in which a Tanzanian NGO deploys information and public media to boost citizens’ demand for accountability in the provision of education and other public services. These experiences have interesting implications for expanding a practitioner’s repertoire of capacity development beyond discrete organizations. They also stimulate thinking about how capacity development is connected to activism.

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