Capacity building rant

I've just been reading yet more stuff about 'capacity building' and I'm fed up with it.

As far as I can recall, capacity building the community sector has not been the problem anywhere I've worked. The problem is relationships. Too many people in positions of power are behaving in disempowering ways towards residents and towards those who experience exlcusion, and then using the notion of capacity-building as a smokescreen. If there's any capacity building to be done, it's in terms of getting these people to behave in a civilised and grown-up manner towards those they are supposed to be supporting, or just get out of the way. If we get these people out of the way, IMHO, the capacity of the community sector will always reassert itself. Rant over.

Comments

[Phil Green]

Yep, well said, and spot on, but for me the really interesting question is how those of us who've perhaps seen ourselves as not very influential in the past can build up our sense of being more influential.

[Richard McKeever]

Yes I totally agree Kevin - The implicit assumption in the term "capacity building" is that local communities have limited or zero capacity to run their own lives. This "deficit model" suggests people are in need of support from external professionals to survive.

Whereas the reality is that local communities are the experts in their own lives and are best placed to innovate and establish working, sustainable solutions to the issues that are present in their own neighbourhoods.

I am not suggesting that useful skills can't be exchanged and new techniques taught - but the assumption that local communities start with nothing to contribute is just wrong and diminishes everybody involved in the relationship.

[Kevin Harris]

'Infuence-building' - you're onto something there Phil, indeed it's been churning in my mind the past couple weeks while I was in Kyrgyzstan, trying to understand the context of people still quite close to their soviet legacy and without local or regional elected representatives (regional officials are appointed centrally).

About a month ago I suggested
http://neighbourhoods.typepad.com/neighbourhoods/2006/08/neighbourhood_g.html
that it seems as if there are burdens placed on community activists 'to damn them for taking an interest in their own localities.' I've also tried to articulate something
http://neighbourhoods.typepad.com/neighbourhoods/2006/08/inequalities_at.html
in a more global context 'about ordinary people in their own neighbourhoods facing the consequences of confrontations between frightening forces that are far beyond their powers to influence, and getting pitifully inadequate and belated responses from authorities.' In central Asia as much as in central England, I get a sense that the forces which are beyond people's collective influence are stronger, more significant, and built on less overt values and principles - more sinister perhaps - than has been the case. Much of the problem of influence, of impotence in one's own environment, is not being able to find any purchase on the decision-making processes.

Perhaps I should dust off and polish up my old optimism about the power of horizontal communication through online technologies...

[ian]

The trouble with politicians is that they just want to turn up, spread fairy dust and listen to everyone cheer. (http://ibanda.blogs.com/panchromatica/2006/09/quote_of_the_we.html

...and thats the point really - if people do things for themselves what happens to the politicians? (in which I include people like Chief Officers in local government, Senior Civil Servants, heads of quangos etc because they all have an interest in keeping control)