Document(s) 3 of 13

What is "capacity building"? That is the problem.

—MICK MOORE

In recent years there has been a perceptible upturn in commentary on building local capacities in emergency and postemergency situations. Despite this trend, many relief programs remain characterized by their preponderant externality—as demonstrated by their sources of input and their accountabilities in their approach to management and in their dependence on expatriate staff. Agencies often fail to recognize local resources and skills, and they miss real opportunities to include civil society—NGOs, community organizations, trade unions, religious organizations, professional bodies, foundations, local government—in the management of relief and peacebuilding. Channeling bilateral and multilateral resources through international NGOs can shift accountability and responsibility away from national and local leaders, undermining local capacity and creating further dependence. Emergency assistance can create tensions among local organizations and between refugee and host populations over access to external resources. In short, relief assistance can undermine rather than strengthen indigenous capacity.

The reality of what often happens in emergency assistance programs flies in the face of stated donor policy and oft-expressed good intentions. Virtually every serious major external actor in emergency situations is committed to strengthening local capacity. But clearly, this is easier said than done. Knowing whom to work with (for example, women, traditional leaders, or indigenous NGOs) is as important as knowing how to work with them. Sometimes the wrong capacities may be enhanced, or the capacities of the wrong people may be strengthened, as in the case of freelance militia in Somalia or Hutu militia in the Goma camps. Gender is an especially important area of concern. Women may have been protected from violence in some emergencies, but in many they have been targeted, and in most the burden for children and for the care and feeding of their families has increased.

Capacity Building: Some History

Capacity building, often used synonymously with institution building, institutional development, and organizational development, is in some ways as old as development assistance itself. Slogans such as "helping people to help themselves" point directly at capacity building. The proverb "teach a man to fish" is about building capacity for self-sufficiency. In the 1950s and 1960s, community development focused on building self-help capacities within rural communities. A major purpose of technical assistance has always been to enhance the capacities of individuals and institutions through training, research, and counterpart relationships. Schools, vocational training, and universities all aim to build human capacities for self-development.

The 1969 Pearson Commission Report on international development—the first of many such commissions—spoke extensively of the need to build administrative capacity in developing countries, especially capacity to absorb political and economic change.1 In 1974, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) coined the term capacitation, suggesting that

A "capacitating" operation does not try so much to define or control the future as to establish present conditions or capacities that will permit a given society to meet its problems in the future. The emphasis in such an approach is not on setting future appropriate output targets but on diagnosing current weaknesses and potentials, finding appropriate policies and constantly monitoring the course of development.2

Peter Morgan has tracked the concept of capacity building from its origins in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was based to a large extent on the idea of equipping developing countries with a basic inventory of public sector institutions and, later, strengthening them to improve their performance. By the 1980s, the idea of institutional development had gained several new features. In addition to government, the private sector and NGOs had been added to the mix. The time frame had also changed, with institutional development seen as a longer-term process of restructuring and institutional change. It had become "more concerned about the adaptability and responsiveness of development institutions … [and it had] moved beyond the framework of individual organizations. For the first time institutional analysis began to look at sectoral perspectives and at groups of institutions. … Finally, institutional development began to address itself to the sustainability issue—not just the 'what works?' question, but the 'what lasts?' question."3

Despite its long history, growing sophistication, and a renewed emphasis in the 1990s, capacity building, or the way it has been managed, has in many cases resulted in the opposite of what was intended. Capacities have not been built, institutions have failed, organizations have not met expectations. In a damning critique of international assistance to Rwanda prior to the genocide, Peter Uvin discusses the capacity building efforts of Belgium, Switzerland, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP):

As Rwanda's farmers were facing crises without precedent, as inequality and corruption reached endemic proportions, as hope for the future was extinguished, and as violence, hatred and human rights abuses became government policy, the international community was congratulating Rwanda for its improved capacity to overcome its "limited absorptive capacity," and to "improve its capacity to design and implement development projects."4

The realization of failure is not new. Writing less dramatically in 1978—a time so long past in the development experience that age almost disqualifies it from relevance—John Oxenham and Robert Chambers described the weakness of capacity building as it was then conceived: an effort basically designed and implemented by outsiders. Usually styled as "technical assistance" or "technical cooperation," capacity building judged what people did not know and what they required. "Providing specialist people-services necessarily implies that [outsiders] have the expertise which the people lack and must transmit it to the people. So the people 'to be developed' start out on an unequal footing.…the fairly strong human bias towards authoritarianism is legitimized and reinforced through the explicit authority of professional expertise."5

Writing in 1984, Majid Rahnema, a former aid official and once a minister in the government of Iran, criticized the idea of community development by outsiders "as if [villagers] could not develop themselves. This infantilization of the deprived population…is the primary reason why development activities do not take root in the life of communities."6 A decade later, he observed that instead of enhancing the development process or reducing poverty, capacity building had too often enhanced the abilities of predatory governments, building "their capacity to 'milk' their own people, and…the assistance they receive from their richer foreign patrons."7 These early critics foreshadowed the call for and the widespread acceptance by the early 1990s of participatory development and empowerment—terms that are also fraught with definitional problems. But the story is getting ahead of itself, and a more systematic consideration of capacity building typologies is in order before determining their relevance to the emergencies and postconflict situations of the twenty-first century.

A Typology of Capacity Building

What is "capacity building"? That is the problem. It includes everything that was covered by the different definitions of "institution building" and much more besides. … Aid agencies would be wise to have no truck with the new jargon of "capacity building" and to insist on using language and terms that have identifiable and precise meanings.8

Moore's imprecation notwithstanding, it is impossible to avoid a term that is in such widespread use. Part of its definitional problem has to do with target and purpose. In some cases individuals, a community, or an organization are to be strengthened. In others, the target is a sector, such as agricultural or health, while in others the target may be an entire societal subset. Alan Fowler has helped to sort this out by separating organizational development from sectoral development and institutional development, the latter representing a broad cross section of organizations, such as informal sector entrepreneurs, or "civil society."

A second area of necessary clarification has to do with the purpose of a capacity building effort. In some cases, capacity building may be seen as the means to an end—for example, enhancing the capacity of a local NGO to deliver emergency assistance. In others, the end may be more important than the means—the development of an organization capable of developing and managing its own programs and strategies independently of outsiders. In some cases, the process of capacity building may be more important than either the means or the ends—such as the stimulation of greater coherence around an issue or within a community. Figure 1.1, adapted from a typology created by Fowler, is an attempt to distinguish both target and purpose in capacity building.

This sort of typology suggests that capacity building is considerably more complex than originally conceived in the training programs and technical assistance of the early development decades. It also suggests that capacity building requires serious attention to target and purpose, as well as to considerations of process. And it helps to explain why capacity building seems to have had little success over four or five decades of experimentation. The reason is that it was usually and unambitiously lodged in the upper-left sector (under "Means") of figure 1.1, strengthening the capacity of organizations to carry out specific functions, often designed by outsiders.

Figure 1.1: Concepts of Capacity Building

Where emergencies are concerned, an early and prominent effort to move the discussion out of this first sector and into the area of ends was the Capacities and Vulnerability Analysis (CVA), developed by Mary Anderson and Peter Woodrow in 1989.9 The CVA is based on the idea that in emergencies, individuals and groups have capacities in addition to the obvious vulnerabilities. In the past, the tendency was for outsiders to focus mainly on vulnerabilities, often becoming preoccupied with symptoms rather than causes. Using the CVA approach, those wishing to assist are urged to identify both capacities and vulnerabilities, building the former and reducing the latter. Essentially, the Capabilities and Vulnerability Analysis uses the idea that outsiders cannot develop others, but that they can help to create an environment and processes that help people on the path to their own development. This is especially true in emergencies, in which investments in longer-term capacities may have considerable impact on people's ability to reconstruct their lives after outsiders are gone.

The CVA is not far removed from Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques developed in the early 1990s. These emerged from a greater awareness among development professionals that there was a considerable gap between the objectives and the results of many rural development efforts. The problem often grew from outsiders' profound lack of understanding of people and context and on the weak involvement in or absence of intended beneficiaries from the planning and implementation of projects. PRA has developed rapidly since its inception, becoming "a family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, and to plan, act, monitor and evaluate."10 PRA provides a systematic approach to learning about people and context, recognizing and building on the capacities of individuals and communities. In PRA, the emphasis is as much on process as on ends.

Much has been written in recent years about the coping strategies that people employ in times of trouble—efforts to reduce their vulnerability and to recover as quickly as possible. Considerably less thought has been given to the coping strategies of local organizations in an emergency. They, too, have capacities and vulnerabilities that may be exploited or become exploitative as an emergency deepens. For example, outsiders frequently view the activities of local NGOs as opportunistic and donor-driven.

In some cases these organizations may "take sides" or become "corrupt." In Afghanistan, many local NGOs channeled aid funds into the war chests of local military commanders and were therefore disparaged and written off by donors. But it is worth considering the issue from another angle. Just as international NGOs are obliged to do things in accordance with donor demands, in Afghanistan some may have had little choice but to appease commanders in order to create space for themselves in their work with local communities.11

The War-Torn Societies Project (WSP), which operated between 1994 and 1998 as a joint effort of UNRISD and the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, sought to move capacity building into the lower-right-hand sector of Figure 1.1. It tried to influence the political arena and the socioeconomic system in accordance with their own interests and perceptions. Using a participatory-action research process, the project operated in four countries: Somalia, Guatemala, Eritrea, and Mozambique. Its premise was that "postconflict rehabilitation typically involves a whole range of actors—internal and external—but…it is often hampered by these actors' lack of understanding of how some of the basic issues and priorities involved in rehabilitation relate to each other."12 The project aimed to identify priorities for the country's policy agenda, recognizing explicitly a number of key issues typically ignored in a postwar situation:

• that power struggles may not have been resolved, and that an election does not necessarily resolve underlying problems (elections may not lead to sustainable power-sharing arrangements);

• that war may have destroyed or discredited traditional social structures, and that their replacements may be weak and may lack legitimacy;

• that postwar governments, cognizant of the urgency and the challenges facing them, may be tempted into authoritarian solutions that work against inclusion, dialogue, and credibility;

• that people's high expectations may be contrasted with low delivery capacities in government;

• that there may be little space for neutral or impartial dialogue;

• that external actors may continue to play divisive roles.

The Importance of a Healthy Civil Society

In recent years, much discussion about capacity building has moved from nuts-and-bolts questions about self-help and teaching a man to fish, to a higher plane in which civil society looms large. Men (or women) may well know how to fish, but may be prevented from deriving a living from their labors by vested interests, an authoritarian regime, environmental problems, or by a conflict that has forced them from the site of their livelihood. Solutions to such problems go beyond standard human resource development efforts, often falling into a broader societal domain. Like capacity building, civil society is a much-used and much-abused term, one that in the space of only a handful of years has found its way onto the covers of dozens of books. Writers on civil society draw inspiration from Hegel, de Tocqueville, and Gramsci, and most owe at least a nod to Robert Putnam's 1993 study of democracy in Italy.13 Putnam was the first to put some empirical clothing on the concept of civil society, demonstrating that long traditions of associational life in northern Italy—unlike in the south—have created the "social capital" responsible there for good governance and a vibrant economy.

The weakness or absence of civil society in much of the developing world has come to be seen as a reason for bad governance, human rights abuse, weak democracy, state collapse, and war. It follows that one way to reduce conflict or to regain stability in a postconflict situation is to strengthen civil society. Strengthening civil society or, more particularly, strengthening the capacity of civil society, has therefore become an important preoccupation of the aid establishment in recent years. The various arguments that comprise this emerging objective have been summarized by Paul Harvey:

A strong civil society is crucial to development. In complex political emergencies, civil society and social capital are badly eroded. Given that there is no government to work with, governance capacity needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up, together with civil society and social capital. It is hoped that this will marginalize existing predatory authorities. Strengthening non-military interests will create a platform for peace by allowing space and a voice for civil society to express its desire for peace.14

There are some suggestions, however, that the civil society discourse has a strong Western European bias, and that it needs refinement. Even where civil society in the south has been strong, it has not been able to prevent disaster. Sri Lanka has a relatively large and mature civil society, but Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu argues that because, historically, much of it had a role in welfare, it was both co-opted and ill-equipped to deal with the creeping authoritarianism of government in the 1970s and 1980s. Two violent uprisings in the south and a civil war in the north led to increasing state-managed violence and political ruthlessness, with a concomitant attack on an already weakened and politically impotent civil society.15

Peter Uvin makes the same point about Rwanda, a country with "an extremely high civil society density."16 Rwandan civil society, however, was unable to prevent or mitigate one of the worst societal crimes of the modern era, Uvin finds, mainly because it had little interest in doing so. As reasons, he cites government and ethnic co-optation, a dangerous political climate for dissidents, and donor funding with an explicitly "apolitical" agenda. In short, courageous proponents of human rights and democracy notwithstanding, neither Sri Lanka nor Rwanda had civil societies of the size and type described by Putnam and the broader literature on connections among democracy, human rights, and civil society.

Harvey suggests that during an emergency, civil society is, in fact, simultaneously emerging, as well as being undermined and contested. He suggests five linked processes that affect civil society during a complex political emergency:

• an extreme process of disengagement of civil society from the state;

• a fallback on primary groupings within civil society. Kinship, tribal, religious, and traditional political structures serve as coping strategies for people in response to state collapse;

• military strategies, extreme scarcity, and displacement that undermine civil society;

• predatory local authorities contesting the space of civil society, moving into the parallel economy, and attempting to create support by drawing on neo-patrimonial ties based on ethnicity;

• the continued strength of civil society at a local level, both in the parallel economy and in traditional institutions.17

These challenges should not suggest, however, that the promotion of civil society as a cornerstone of democracy, human rights, and a culture of inclusion is misplaced. Putnam found that the process had taken five hundred years or more in Italy; thus, a decade of small, uncertain aid infusions cannot be expected to have achieved much so far. What is becoming clear, however, is that support for civil society writ large—clubs, trade unions, NGOs, welfare societies, and self-help groups—may not do much for democracy unless these organizations are explicitly committed to their own independence from government, and more broadly to principles of pluralism, democracy, and human rights.

Why Build Local Capacities?

A second and more traditional reason for building local capacities relates to changes in the relative roles of the state and civil society in the provision of basic services. In some cases there is a specific and practical intent to capacity building. Where government has collapsed, or where it is a combatant in a two-sided conflict, there are good reasons to promote nongovernmental delivery mechanisms for emergency assistance. Building local capacities in such situations can make assistance more effective and more efficient in the short run, as well as in longer-term, postconflict peacebuilding and reconstruction. In this area, some see a neoliberal conspiracy to push back the state—an integral part of draconian structural adjustment policies. In this scenario, civil society— essentially client NGOs—is expected to do the best it can to fill the widest gaps in social services.

Whether this is true or not, some believe that the rise of NGOs has been at the expense of the state. Mozambique is a frequently cited example, as in the following observation from Antonio Donini:

Relief agencies—and NGOs in particular, some of which have programmes larger than those of the largest bilateral donor—have become the chief provider of public welfare and important sources of employment. They also further weaken government structures by siphoning off the remaining trained and competent local professionals…who are attracted by the higher and regular salaries paid by the outsiders.18

This is complex and contested territory, as the chapter on Mozambique will demonstrate. And the statement is not universally true. NGOs are a small part of the social service scene in most countries, and, in some, governments actually welcome and generously subsidize the work of the voluntary sector: health services in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda are good examples.

Toward a Definition of Capacity Building

After almost half a century of conceptual refinement and considerable shortcomings in practice, capacity development has moved beyond simple ideas of organizations and human resource development. Peter Morgan argues that

Capacity development is therefore a more normative and less technique-oriented concept than institutional strengthening or institutional development. … It is the ability of individuals, groups, institutions, organizations and societies to identify and meet development challenges over time. … It implies reshaping the relationship between donors and developing countries with the objective of making endogenous capacities the central focus of attention. …It sets the strengthening or development of individual organizations in a much broader framework of sectoral or national efforts to improve development capabilities.19

Deborah Eade, writing about the Oxfam experience of capacity building, adds that capacity building does not begin and end with NGOs or with donors.

Nor is "civil society" independent of, much less an alternative to, the state. Rather, capacity building involves the whole network of relationships in society: within, between and among households, neighborhoods, grassroots or community-based organizations, unions, religious confessions, training institutions, research bodies, government ministries, the private sector, NGOs and donor agencies—whether official or nongovernmental, Northern or Southern. Capacity building is also concerned with creating new relationships of mutuality and reciprocity within a given society and beyond.20

These definitions, and others like them, draw on the (mostly inconclusive) capacity building experience of several decades. The definitions are long and vague, and invoke all manner of good things—something for which their authors often apologize.21 The problem is not so much the definitions as the context into which they must fit. Because contexts differ so widely and because the intent of a capacity building effort may differ from one agency or one situation to another, writers offer general, all-inclusive, and high-sounding definitions. These no doubt bewilder the average field-based project officer who must decide whether to give a training course or to "build civil society"—or, more pointedly, whether to forget about the long term and to take immediate action in aid of people who are "dying like flies" in the here and now.

Practitioners may take some solace from an apocryphal story about Christopher Wren, surveying construction on St. Paul's Cathedral. Coming across a stonemason, he asked what the man was doing. "Cutting stone," came the answer. Later, he met another stonemason and asked the same question. "I am building a cathedral," the man replied. Thus, context, purpose, and target will ensure that an appropriate approach in one situation is inappropriate in another. A simpler definition of capacity building in emergency situations has been developed by Sue Lautze and John Hammock, who observed that "capacity building is any intervention designed to reinforce or create strengths upon which communities can draw to offset disaster-related vulnerability."22

The problem, of course, is not so much the intention to reinforce or create strengths, but whether in fact strengths actually result from the effort. The chapter on Guatemala demonstrates that what is intended is not always what happens. Knowing what to do and what not to do becomes, therefore, the critical issue.

What to Do? Issues in Capacity Building

The following sections deal with key issues that arise in capacity building efforts: training, timing, and the capacity of those who would build capacity in others.

When in Doubt, Train

Despite improved understanding among development agencies about the complexities of capacity building, in practice such work boils down too often to giving the intended beneficiary a training program. In Bosnia, two years after the Dayton Peace Accords, the fledgling Bosnian NGO community was attempting to handle enormous psychosocial upheaval, feeding programs for refugees, reconstruction of homes, microcredit, and a hundred other challenges that few were equipped to deal with. There were at the time at least six capacity building programs being offered by international NGOs and United Nations agencies, all of them generic training courses on basic issues of NGO management. At a 1997 meeting that discussed the NGO sector as a whole, several Bosnian NGO managers agreed that while they might need such training, none ever wanted to attend another program on how to write a mission statement or how to write a project proposal.23

The long-term vision of many of the Bosnian organizations may have been unclear, but the problem was not so much one of mission statements as one of survival in a climate in which donors themselves had no long-term perspective, doling out small grants in three- and six-month tranches. How to write a project proposal was a generic issue, to be sure, not least because every donor required a different format, and because few would accept proposals written in the Bosnian language. In fact, the courses had all the hallmarks of the capacity building style criticized by Oxenham and Chambers in 1978: telling people what they need, essentially so they could conform with the management standards and programming requirements of outsiders.

Bosnia is discussed at greater length in chapter 2. Criticism of the Bosnian situation notwithstanding, training may be precisely what a community-based organization (CBO) or an NGO needs. But determining genuine needs is no easy task. Much has been written on capacity assessment, the best of it describing a range of responses that become more complex and time-consuming, depending on the depth of change required. The intent in building the capacity of a particular NGO, for example, may be to enable it to undertake specific functions or to help the organization manage itself better. Or it may aim to build longer-term viability, strength, and sustainability.

Depending on the existing capacities of the organization, all that may be required at the function end of the spectrum is information, for example, on how to manage a feeding program. Managing a feeding program in an unstable and dangerous situation, however, requires deeper knowledge and experience. Managing for greater efficiency and effectiveness may require significant organizational change. Helping to build an NGO's longer-term financial viability or helping it to become an effective advocate for humanitarian issues will require time and may require changes in attitudes and individual behavior. In each case, training may or may not be indicated, but short-term boilerplate courses are rarely likely to suffice. Figure 1.2 suggests that the difficulty and the time required will depend on the depth of change required.

Time and Timing

In much of the current literature, there is clear recognition that the most effective kinds of capacity building take time, and that short-term efforts applied on a piecemeal basis have limited impact. Writing about development rather than emergency situations, Peter Morgan says that the normal three- to five-year donor time frame is inadequate. "Capacity issues are seen as long-term problems that can take—as in the case of public sector reform—fifteen to twenty years to address in a serious way.

Figure 1.2: Time and Complexity in Organizational Change

Source: Adapted from Fowler, Striking a Balance, 193 (see Fig. 1.1), and Piers Campbell, "Relations between Northern and Southern NGOs: Effective Partnerships for Sustainable Development" (Geneva: International Council of Voluntary Agencies, 1989).

The development of effective, viable organizations is seen as a long-term evolutionary process that requires patience and consistency."24

What does this imply for those working in emergency situations, where there are real pressures to act urgently? Obviously, many emergencies, especially in the early stages, do not lend themselves to long-term planning or capacity building. International relief agencies must act to alleviate suffering as best they can and as quickly as possible. But there is a problem of mind-set where timing is concerned, exacerbated by institutional donors whose funding is limited to very short time horizons. This issue is raised with poignancy in chapter 3 on Haiti. The mind-set means there is often no time to identify, much less to strengthen, local capacities; no time to study local coping mechanisms; no time to work with local NGOs; and not much time to think about the longer-term requirements that will come with reconstruction and postconflict attempts to rebuild normalcy.

Although this sort of situation is undesirable, it is also understandable, up to a point. But many of today's complex emergencies have been going on for five, ten, and more years. During such an extended time frame, it is possible to learn more about local communities and cultures, and to build longer-term relationships with local organizations. By 1997, the war in Sierra Leone was in its sixth year. But with the exception of the Sierra Leone Red Cross and some church-related organizations, very few Sierra Leonean NGOs had been able to attract funding or any other form of institutional support from their northern counterparts. For international NGOs with an interest, the reason given for so little interaction were problems of probity. Sierra Leonean NGOs believed, however, that their honesty was subject to monitoring, contracts, and the creation of adequate checks and balances. They were particularly unhappy that internationals gave this "excuse" for what could only be seen as avoidance of serious capacity building efforts. As a result, most Sierra Leonean NGOs believed that they were no more capable of effective efforts in 1997 than they had been in 1991.25 More recent events in Sierra Leone will be considered in the chapter by Thomas Turay.

The Capacity to Build Capacity

One of the reasons that outsiders have focused so resolutely on generic training and the transfer of information to improve basic functions has to do with time. Another has to do with emergency field-workers themselves. Often young, overworked, operating in high-stress situations, and subject to sudden reassignment, few are equipped or mandated to gain a deep understanding of communities in conflict, whether local civil society organizations or NGOs. In short, their capacity to build capacity is limited. As Lautze and Hammock put it, "This lack of capacity to use or build capacity is also due to limited institutional knowledge, a lack of previous experience with capacity building and a dearth of case studies focusing on how to work with populations in crisis. It is not surprising, then, that truly effective means of working with local populations are neither taught formally in training seminars nor exchanged informally among more and lesser experienced staff."26

A further issue has to do with money: can a funding agency also provide effective support for capacity building? Many do, but the pitfalls are enormous. Whatever form the capacity building takes, beneficiaries may participate only because they think they see a gleam of silver at the end of the tunnel. If their purpose in participating is largely financial, effective change may be compromised from the outset. A second issue, even if the first is not a problem, is that the capacity building agency may attempt to instill ideas and priorities that are in line with its own funding and programming mandates, instead of working to build independent ways of thinking and working in the intended beneficiary. The Karachi-based NGO Resource Centre aims to build short- and long-term strategic and management capacities in Pakistani NGOs. When established in 1987, the center made a deliberate decision to avoid involvement in the funding of its partner organizations, because it believed that this would lead, sooner or later, to damaging compromises on the part of both giver and receiver. In a book on the experience of African NGOs, Rick James says that the question of "whose purpose organizational development is serving—the Northern NGO or the Southern NGO" must be rigorously addressed.27

Interim Conclusions

It is possible that the capacity building discourse (this chapter included) sets the bar too high. If, after fifty years of effort, capacity building still proves to be difficult in development settings where it is a priority, how much more difficult will it likely be in emergency settings, where the primary and most immediate goal is to save lives? Where capacity builders lack the mandate, capacity building skills, understanding of the local context, and staying power, mistakes inevitably will be made.

Several interim conclusions can be drawn from the literature on capacity building and emergencies. The most prominent is that in order to be effective, a capacity building approach must be clear in its purpose: does it intend to create a specific capacity within a single organization, or does it aim to build the institution and its capacity to undertake independent thought and action? Second, the target must be clear— whether a single organization, a sectoral activity such as health delivery, or an institutional subset such as civil society. The time required and the complexity of the exercise will increase depending on the depth of change envisaged. The simple transfer of information may not require great effort, but building knowledge, changing behavior, and altering attitudes require investments with significantly different orders of magnitude.

In approaching the question of civil society, outsiders need to build their own understanding while exercising caution. Attempts to build civil society are important, but civil society may be contested space during a volatile and politicized emergency, simultaneously emerging and contracting, part solution and perhaps part problem. Training is not a panacea; while it has a role to play, it is not in any way synonymous with capacity building. A major issue has to do with the capacity of potential capacity builders: in emergencies such capacities may be limited. And a general lesson about capacity building, one now decades old, is that builders must have good knowledge of "buildees," their society, and the context in which the effort is expected to take place. There is no substitute for a clear understanding and analysis of the local situation, something that cannot be achieved without the intimate participation of those affected.

These tidy prescriptions—uncontentious and fairly commonsensical— flow from the literature. The chapters that follow will demonstrate how difficult it is to convert what looks, on the printed page, like common sense into concrete action in the midst of a complex emergency and its aftermath.

Notes

1. Lester B. Pearson, Partners in Development (New York: Praeger, 1969), 232.

2. Marshall Wolfe, Elusive Development (London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books; Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1996), quoted in Deborah Eade, Capacity Building: An Approach to People-Centred Development (Oxford: Oxfam, 1997), 16.

3. Peter Morgan, "Capacity Development—An Introduction," in Emerging Issues in Capacity Development (Ottawa: Institute on Governance, 1994), 9.

4. Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1998), 89. Quotations are from a World Bank report.

5. John Oxenham and Robert Chambers, "Organising Education and Training for Rural Development: Problems and Challenges," quoted in Bernard Lecomte, Project Aid: Limitations and Alternatives (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1986), 45.

6. Majid Rahnema, "The Grassroots of the Future," quoted in Lecomte, Project Aid, 43.

7. Majid Rahnema, "Poverty," in The Development Dictionary, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books, 1992), 166.

8. Mick Moore, "Promoting Good Government by Supporting Institutional Development,"Institute of Development Studies Bulletin 26, no. 2 (1995), quoted in Eade, Capacity Building, 1.

9. Mary B. Anderson and Peter J. Woodrow, Rising from the Ashes: Development Strategies in Times of Disaster (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989).

10. Robert Chambers, Whose Reality Counts? Putting the Last First (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1997), 102.

11. This theme is discussed by Jonathan Goodhand and Peter Chamberlain in "Dancing with the Prince: NGOs' Survival Strategies in the Afghan Conflict," Development in States of War (Oxford: Oxfam, 1996), 38–50.

12. Matthias Stiefel, Rebuilding after War: A Summary Report of the War-Torn Societies Project (Geneva: War-Torn Societies Project and Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1998), 5.

13. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

14. Paul Harvey, "Rehabilitation in Complex Political Emergencies: Is Rebuilding Civil Society the Answer?"Disasters 22, no. 3 (1998): 203.

15. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, "Sri Lanka: Civil Society, the Nation, and the State-Building Challenge," in Civil Society and the Aid Industry, ed. Alison Van Rooy (London: Earthscan, 1998), 104–33.

16. Uvin, Aiding Violence, 166.

17. Harvey, "Rehabilitation in Complex Political Emergencies," 208.

18. Antonio Donini, "The Bureaucracy and the Free Spirits: Stagnation and Innovation in the Relationship between the UN and NGOs,"Third World Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1995): 436.

19. Morgan, "Capacity Development," 10–11.

20. Eade, Capacity Building, 21–22.

21. In fairness, Morgan has written much more extensively about capacity building than the selection of one paragraph might imply. Eade has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking book on the subject.

22. Sue Lautze and John Hammock, Coping with Crisis, Coping with Aid: Capacity Building, Coping Mechanisms, and Dependency, Linking Relief and Development (New York: United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs, 1996), 2.

23. Author's personal discussions at the meeting.

24. Morgan, "Capacity Development," 12.

25. Ian Smillie, "Sierra Leone,"NGOs in Complex Emergencies Project (Ottawa: CARE Canada, 1997), 12.

26. Lautze and Hammock, Coping with Crisis, 10–11.

27. Rick James, Demystifying Organization Development: Practical Capacity-Building Experiences of African NGOs (Oxford: International Training and NGO Research Centre, 1998), 169.

Document(s) 3 of 13