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Capacity and Capacity Development: Coping

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 public administration and development
Public Admin. Dev. 30, 2–10 (2010)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.559

CAPACITY AND CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT:

COPING WITH COMPLEXITY
DERICK W. BRINKERHOFF*,y WITH PETER J. MORGANz
RTI International, Washington DC, USA

SUMMARY
This overview article introduces the topic of capacity and capacity development (CD), noting the vagueness and multiplicity of
definitions and approaches. It presents the model of capacity developed by the European Centre for Development Policy
Management (ECDPM) study, and reviews our evolving understanding of CD. Brief summaries of the contributions to the
symposium highlight the main findings and key points. The contents of the symposium include four country cases—Pakistan,
Tanzania, Brazil, and Papua New Guinea (PNG)—and one conceptual piece on CD in fragile states. Several common themes
emerge: the benefits of viewing capacity and CD through systems lenses, the salience of the politics of CD; and the need to
change how donors and capacity builders approach the practice of CD. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION
Attention to capacity and capacity development (CD) has endured since the birth of international assistance, yet
debates on how to define capacity and how to develop it continue. Analysts and practitioners are still searching for
frameworks and tools that can help with capacity assessment, development, and monitoring and evaluation.
Capacity issues are intimately entwined with technical assistance policy and practice, and donor-country relations,
which complicates sorting out content and process. Does CD remain a ‘black box’, as Whyte (2004) asks? What has
been learned about capacity and CD, and their relationship to achieving sustainable results? What are the
implications for analysis and practice, both for international donors and country decision-makers?
This symposium offers a contribution toward addressing these questions. This overview article briefly examines
key conceptual issues, introduces the contents of the symposium, and highlights several common themes. It
concludes with some lessons and policy implications.

THROUGH THE CAPACITY LOOKING GLASS

Exploring capacity can have an Alice-in-Wonderland feel: different definitions and models inhabit disjunctive
realities where underlying assumptions are neither obvious nor transferrable. Like Alice, we wander through these
worlds in varying states of befuddlement or irritation. As Morgan (2003, 1) notes, the concept of capacity ‘seems to
exist somewhere in a nether world between individual training and national development’. Given the breadth and
vagueness of the analytic territory, it is not surprising that, as a topic for study and an intervention strategy, the
literature on capacity and CD is voluminous and disparate, and mixes empirical and normative perspectives. Much
of the literature can also be sub-divided into sector-specific treatments of what capacity building is and how it
should be pursued. Here we do not review that literature, a task that others have undertaken (see, for example,
Fukuda-Parr et al., 2002, Lopes and Theisohn, 2003, Boesen, 2004, Whyte, 2004). Rather, we summarize the

*Correspondence to: D. W. Brinkerhoff, RTI International, 701 13th Street NW, Suite 750, Washington DC, 20005, USA.
E-mail: dbrinkerhoff@rti.org
y
Distinguished Fellow in International Public Management.
z
Independent Consultant.

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

 CAPACITY AND CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT: COPING WITH COMPLEXITY 3

approach to describing and analyzing capacity and CD that forms the conceptual foundation for the articles in this
symposium. The research team associated with the European Centre for Development Policy Management
(ECDPM) developed the approach inductively through the country fieldwork of the multi-year study.
The ECDPM study aimed to shed light on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of capacity and CD, decoupled from
international donor intervention. This separation placed emphasis on internal endowments and processes and their
connections to their surrounding environments, which led to the conceptual lynchpin of the ECDPM approach to
understanding capacity and CD: systems theory.1 Several core postulates inform the approach.2 First, systems
consist of nested, inter-related components whose properties influence each other in ways that exhibit varying
degrees of predictability. Second, system outputs are a product of the interactions among the various components,
and these interactions tend to be complex and nonlinear. Third, systems persist over time through emergent
processes of adaptation, self-organization, and performance.
These propositions can be incorporated into a definition of capacity: the evolving combination of attributes,
capabilities, and relationships that enables a system to exist, adapt, and perform. The ECDPM study sought through
an iterative analysis of the country case studies to identify and clarify the nature of those attributes, capabilities, and
relationships. These were grouped into five core capabilities that contribute to system capacity performance.

CAPACITY: FIVE CORE CAPABILITIES

To the degree that a system (operationally defined as an organization or a network of organizations) develops and
integrates these capabilities, capacity—in the broad sense of being able to achieve a desired collective purpose—is
generated and enhanced. The five capabilities include:3

The capability to commit and engage. Actors are able to: mobilize resources (financial, human, organizational);
create space and autonomy for independent action; motivate unwilling or unresponsive partners; plan, decide,
and engage collectively to exercise their other capabilities.

The capability to carry out technical, service delivery, and logistical tasks. Actors are able to: produce acceptable
levels of performance; generate substantive outputs and outcomes (e.g., health or education services, employ-
ment opportunities, justice, and rule of law); sustain production over time; and add value for their clients,
beneficiaries, citizens, etc.

The capability to relate and attract support. Actors can: establish and manage linkages, alliances, and/or
partnerships with others to leverage resources and actions; build legitimacy in the eyes of key stakeholders; deal
effectively with competition, politics, and power differentials.

The capability to adapt and self-renew. Actors are able to: adapt and modify plans and operations based on
monitoring of progress and outcomes; proactively anticipate change and new challenges; learn by doing; cope
with changing contexts and develop resiliency.

The capability to balance diversity and coherence. Actors can: develop shared short- and long-term strategies
and visions; balance control, flexibility, and consistency; integrate and harmonize plans and actions in complex,
multi-actor settings; and cope with cycles of stability and change.

The five-capabilities model highlights several important implications in thinking about capacity and CD. First is
the complexity and inter-connectedness of the elements associated with capacity, which means that reductionist
efforts to focus on separate components of capacity are unlikely to provide a sound basis for CD strategies and
interventions. Second, capacity is a latent phenomenon; the presence and quality of each of the capabilities only
becomes apparent when actors exercise them to achieve some sort of result. This characteristic of capacity is a

1
For other research that used systems theory to build a model to explain institutional sustainability that included capacity and performance
variables, see Brinkerhoff et al. (1990).
2
The systems literature is huge. See, for example, Jackson (2003), Mittleton-Kelly (2003), or Burns (2007). For an interesting, though uneven,
application to international development, see Rihani (2002).
3
The study team went through several iterations in the identification, description, and analysis of the core capabilities. This list summarizes the
capability framework in the study’s final report (Baser and Morgan, 2008).

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4 D. W. BRINKERHOFF WITH P. J. MORGAN

major impediment to assessment and measurement, and contributes to the means-ends confusion present in many
treatments of the topic. Third, capacity and its associated capabilities emerge as a function of the agency of country
actors. In other words, although outsiders may be able to assist in developing and reinforcing capacity, sustained
capacity results when endogenous actor-led processes stimulate the creation and strengthening of the five core
capabilities.

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT
As Brinkerhoff (in this volume) discusses, CD—as operationalized by international donors—targets individuals,
organizations, or the enabling environment (politics and policies). At the individual level, CD has traditionally
focused on filling skill and knowledge gaps through training. Organizational CD has targeted improvements in
management systems and re-structuring, or if aimed at more than a single organization, public sector reforms such
as civil service modernization and/or decentralization. The recognition that the enabling environment affects the
success of lower-level CD interventions has led to efforts to address politics and policies. Examples of CD include
civil society strengthening and pro-poor planning and budgeting.
From a narrow focus on the ‘what’ of CD, theory and practice have also turned to the ‘how’. This shift is reflected
in the so-called process approaches to development interventions, which include CD (see Brinkerhoff, 2008).
Process considerations are embodied in today’s concern with ownership, country-led development, and donor co-
ordination (see Lopes and Theisohn, 2003, OECD, 2006). Relatedly, CD concerns power: the power to decide what
to do, what resources to provide, and where to target them. As Baser and Morgan (2008, 20) note,
Capacity development is about altering the access of people to authority, resources and opportunities. It
privileges some groups and individuals and not others. Coalitions with power either inside or outside
organizations must, in some way, either directly support or tacitly accept these altered patterns and their
implications for their own interests.

From a policy perspective, a critical question is whether CD can effectively be planned in advance and supported
by outside intervention. Because donors tend to concentrate on the capability to produce results, externally funded
CD stresses targeting, specifying, and achieving clear objectives, and managing for results. Proponents who favor
this perspective tend to see CD as an activity that can be treated as a project or a program. Such planned CD appears
to work best under the following conditions:

a shared consensus about policy and direction

available resources to pay for CD support systems

tangible objectives, especially technical and functional

the possibility of control from senior managers

a supply-side starting point

quantifiable means and ends

a focus on programmable results.

A second CD strategy is incrementalism, based on the principles of adaptiveness and flexibility in

implementation.4 Based on the ECDPM case analyses, the incremental approach to CD tends to work best in
situations where contexts are unstable and the choice of strategy is difficult to clarify. These include situations
where capacity builders are uncertain about making predictions about capacity and performance needs, or when the
constraints or the degree of commitment are not well understood. Using adjustments and small interventions, actors
can seek out opportunities, try different changes, move in fits and starts, and try to learn what might work under

4
Incrementalism as an implementation strategy has a long history; see Lindblom’s classic article (1959) on ‘muddling through’. On international
development project flexibility and adaptation, see Brinkerhoff and Ingle (1989).

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 CAPACITY AND CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT: COPING WITH COMPLEXITY 5

different conditions (see, for example, James and Wrigley, 2006). Such small experiments can lower the risks
inherent in large, more complex CD interventions.
A third type of CD strategy can be characterized as emergence: a largely undirected process of collective action
resulting in increased capacity. Emergent strategies are comprised of a shared sense of meaning and values, some
sort of collective identity and a system boundary, some fungible resources, some basic rules of conduct, and a
protected space that allows for operational autonomy to experiment and learn. Capacity emerges out of the multiple
inter-dependencies and interactions among actors within the system. CD focuses on nurturing relationships and
then capitalizing on opportunities to enhance performance and build capabilities; it is related to incrementalist
strategies, but is less directive. The emergent strategy was evident in the ECDPM cases where CD was not donor
funded or designed.
In the real world, CD often combines elements of all three of these strategies. Objectives and targets are specified
at the start, with the recognition that plans will need to be adapted incrementally over time as a function of changing
circumstances, learning, and emergent social capital formation. Hirschman’s research (1984) on grassroots
development in Latin America adds nuance to the time dimension of CD by demonstrating that what may initially
appear to be a failed intervention can often provide an experience and learning base that contributes to a subsequent
success. Thus, the growth of capacity may not necessarily be apparent within the timeframe of a single CD
intervention.
Opportunities for emergent CD are often found where lack of state presence and resources create space for other
actors. For example, in Chad in the mid to late 1990s, because the central government’s capacity to provide primary
education was weak, local communities established parents’ associations, which evolved to fulfill an expanded set
of education management functions, including hiring and paying teachers, raising local revenues for school
operations, and exercising performance oversight (Fass and Desloovere, 2004). The associations became, in effect,
learning laboratories for community members, enabling the emergence of communities’ capacities for organizing
and taking collective action over time. Besides education management, communities were eventually able to
confront public officials, demand accountability, and mount pressure to make them respond.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Here we turn to brief summaries of the articles in the symposium. Four of the articles offer country case illustrations
of CD. The fifth discusses CD in fragile states and offers a framework intended to inform donor intervention
strategies. Two of the cases look at capacity issues in public sector organizations: education in Pakistan and civil
service reform in Tanzania. Capacity in civil society organizations is the topic of the other two country studies: a
cross-sectoral, poverty-focused network of civil society organizations, public agencies, private firms in Brazil; and
churches in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Watson and Khan’s article on decentralized education service delivery in Pakistan demonstrates how context and
capacity reforms are connected, and the inherently political nature of service delivery capacity building. The
authors describe how decentralization influenced incentives for improvements in education sector management and
service delivery by creating local political accountability for service delivery. Two donor programs, the Punjab
Education Sector Reform Programme (PESRP) and the Support to Decentralized Local Government in Faisalabad
Project (SDLGF), built on these positive forces for local accountability to enhance the capacity of the education
bureaucracy to deliver services.
The CD strategy of both PESRP and SDLGF sought to address the supply-side weaknesses in the education
bureaucracy that constrained its ability to respond to increased demand for services. PESRP created a program
implementation unit (PIU) at the provincial level to carry out reforms. A dynamic PIU director, with backing from
the Chief Minister, and a commitment to performance and results, succeeded in stimulating significant
improvements in education policy, management, and service delivery. In SDLGF, a strategic policy unit, led by a
district official, and integrated within the city district government level, served to implement reforms and stimulate
better service delivery. In both cases senior politicians were committed to improved education, and shielded the

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6 D. W. BRINKERHOFF WITH P. J. MORGAN

reform technocrats from interference as the programs introduced innovations in teacher training, evidence-based
planning and budgeting, information systems and reporting, and resource transfers.
Morgan, Baser, and Morin examine how the Tanzanian government built capacity to manage a multi-donor
funded Public Service Reform Program (PSRP), a large ($100 million) effort to reduce costs, restructure service
delivery, build new management systems, increase participation and accountability, and improve performance. The
authors focus on the capacity of the unit that was the implementer for PSRP. Unlike previous administrative reform
projects, which employed PIUs to manage reform, for PSRP the Tanzanian government integrated the reform team
into the President’s Office of the Public Service Management Department (PO-PSM). This decision in and of itself
contributed to reform management capacity: it gave the reform team access to senior government officials, it
signaled government support for reform to the rest of the public service, it enhanced the team’s authority, and it
increased co-ordination with other implementing partners. Other contributors to PO-PSM’s capacity were:
development of individual competencies of the team through recruitment, peer-to-peer learning with reformers in
other countries, and senior–junior staff mentoring; symbolic and values-based incentives to shape staff
commitment and motivation; explicit attention to building linkages with other reform agency partners, both
government and donors, to create support, buy-in, and trust; and an approach to reform implementation that
emphasized facilitation, learning, and adaptation.
The authors recount the challenges that PO-PSM faced in balancing leading the reform versus facilitating
engagement of other government agencies, and focusing on internal capabilities of the reform team to control the
reform versus building broader public sector capacity through sharing implementation responsibility with others,
and creating positive linkages with partners. During the period 2000–2008, they note a shift in CD strategy after
2005, when the relatively conventional planned approach to CD began to incorporate elements of the emergent CD
strategy. This shift reflected PO-PSM’s move away from management by control toward transformational
leadership, which opened space for the pursuit of opportunities by implementing partners as they arose; and PSRP’s
evolution beyond rapid rollout of reform components to institutionalization and sustainability of reforms.
In their case study of COEP (Committee of Entities in the Struggle against Hunger and for a Full Life) in Brazil,
Schnell and Saxby focus on the 16-year evolution of the network from its founding by a small group of social
activists to today’s nationwide presence in all Brazilian states. COEP mobilized civil society groups, public
agencies, and private firms around a social agenda that includes poverty reduction, redress of inequality and
exclusion, economic empowerment, and food security. As the cross-sectoral network’s membership grew,
COEP developed a non-hierarchical structure governed by a board and an executive committee. In the 1990s COEP
expanded across the country by creating state-level networks that operated autonomously under the core
principles, guidelines, and loose co-ordination of the original national network. All COEP programs are volunteer-
run, with a strong reliance on corporate social responsibility contributions from private firms and state-
owned enterprises. Eventually, given the size and scope of the network’s programs throughout Brazil, COEP
established a small management office with paid staff, whose costs are supported by a subset of member
organizations.
COEP’s evolution is a clear example of an emergent CD strategy, with capacity for vision, leadership, strategic
thinking, and action growing and diffusing as a function of pursuing opportunities, learning by doing, and
organizational change. The credibility of the founder provided legitimacy and helped to attract resources early on
that enabled COEP to demonstrate performance, and thereby build a support base both within the network and with
outside stakeholders. With no external funding dedicated explicitly to CD, COEP was not constrained by a donor
agenda, advice, or rules for deciding on management structures, procedures, or skill building. In fact, COEP
leadership and members did not think of their programs and activities as explicitly aimed at building the network’s
capacity; they were simply interested in furthering their social mobilization mission, fulfilling their commitment to
citizenship values, and reducing poverty and hunger. So in this sense, COEP’s CD strategy was, to a large extent,
informal and unconscious: a by-product of managing and doing.
Hauck investigates how faith-based organizations (FBOs) contribute to creating and strengthening social
capital, which can be a valuable resource for restoring governance and service delivery capacity in fragile states.
Examining the case of PNG, a fragile state with high levels of endemic violence and social division, weak

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 CAPACITY AND CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT: COPING WITH COMPLEXITY 7

governance, and limited state service delivery capacity, the author explores the role of churches in filling capacity
gaps in governance and service delivery. FBOs in PNG are highly diverse and tend not to speak with a single voice;
in some instances they promote competition and divisiveness, particularly the fundamentalist evangelical churches.
However, collectively they enjoy widespread legitimacy and support. The so-called mainline churches have been in
the country for over 100 years and are long-time partners with government in service delivery. FBOs provide
around half of the health services in PNG and partner with the state in about 40 per cent of schools.
Besides direct service provision, FBOs contribute to better governance and improved performance through:
mobilizing their members to participate in politics and public affairs, sharing information and pushing for
transparency, serving as advocates and watchdogs for social justice and rule of law, and facilitating reconciliation
and peacebuilding. These actions enhance communication, trust, and empowerment: key elements of social capital.
Hauck identifies several capabilities that enable churches to shape and build social capital: their capability to link
policy and practice through networks, to span boundaries that mitigate conflict, and to bond effectively with local
communities due to their deep historical roots. Churches have unique convening authority to bring stakeholders
together to address societal issues, which is especially important for improving governance. As for what donors can
do to take advantage of FBOs’ capacity in fragile states, the author notes their positive features deriving from their
embeddedness and stabilizing potential, but cautions against ignoring the inherently diverse nature of FBOs as well
as their own fragility and operational limitations.
Going beyond a single country case, Brinkerhoff offers a synthesizing perspective on donor strategies and
interventions for CD in fragile states. He notes that capacity can be conceptualized at the level of individuals,
organizations, or the enabling environment; and CD can target gaps and constraints in resources, skills and
knowledge, organizations, politics and power, and incentives. The analysis identifies five interconnected CD
dilemmas for intervention in fragile states: state versus non-state service provision, services now versus
institutional strengthening, immediate security versus long-term stability, technical quick fixes versus political
realities, and reliance on external versus local actors.
The author builds a model of CD in fragile states based on three intersecting dimensions that are the sources of
the five dilemmas. These are: the amount of time required to produce a capacity improvement, the degree of
complexity and difficulty associated with CD, and the magnitude of change necessary for the CD intervention.
The model provides a graphic portrayal of where donor CD programs can vary on the three dimensions and serves
to inform CD strategies in the highly politicized, fragmented, and chaotic environment of post-conflict
intervention in fragile states. Brinkerhoff concludes with a set of factors recognized as being associated with
successful CD: harmonized CD purposes, specificity and selectivity in CD targeting, balance among the three
dimensions (time, complexity, and degree of change), competent capacity developers, and in-depth knowledge of
country contexts.

COMMON THEMES
The articles in this symposium touch upon several common themes that advance our understanding of capacity and
CD. Primary among these is the importance of seeing capacity and CD through systems lenses. Another common
theme is the political dimension of CD. Finally, all the contributions suggest implications for changing how donors
and capacity builders approach the practice of CD.

Systemic perspectives
All of the contributions highlight the need to view capacity systemically and the complexities of CD that flow from
an expanded perspective on capacity. Systems thinking emphasizes the multiple factors involved in creating and
sustaining capacity, the connections among those factors, and the boundaries that distinguish them. The ECDPM
five-capabilities model aims to draw different boundaries around capacity factors from the traditional ones (e.g.,

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resources, skills, and management systems) precisely to reframe capacity and CD to incorporate a set of intangible
elements beyond the so-called ‘hard’ factors that are the focus of most donor-funded CD.
Intangibles remain largely unrecognized as contributing to capacity and performance in developing countries.5
The country cases and the ECDPM model offer a corrective. They explicitly distinguish the impact on CD of values,
vision, leadership, management style, and organizational culture. Watson and Khan note the importance of the
vision and leadership of both politicians and technocrats in implementing education sector innovations in Pakistan.
Similarly, Morgan et al. cite the organizational culture of Tanzania’s PO-PSM as contributing to building the unit’s
capacity and promoting public service reform. The centrality of values and vision—put in place initially by
COEP’s founder, Betinho—plus a flexible and non-hierarchical management style, helped to enable COEP to scale
up and achieve broad socio-economic results in Brazil. In PNG, the spiritual values inherent in FBOs, coupled with
leadership that inspired local people’s engagement, gave the churches the trust and legitimacy among both public
officials and community members that reinforced their capacity to provide services effectively and to promote
governance improvements.
The contributions shed light on the dynamics of CD, and how capacity grows through endogenous processes of
self-organization, adaptation, and emergence. The evolution of COEP’s network, along with the PNG churches
case, illustrates clearly the power of emergent strategies for CD where endogenous actors create structures,
procedures, and interventions that produce concrete results, as well as contribute to the formation of social capital.
The time dimension is important for emergence; the capacity of both COEP and the churches in PNG developed
over an extended period of time. The Tanzanian government had a long history of public service reform prior to
PSRP, and decisions that affected PO-PSM’s growth in implementation capacity were informed by past experience
of Tanzanian public officials as well as what the donors wanted.

The politics of capacity development

Among the features of building and maintaining capacity that systemic perspectives illuminate is the impact of
politics. The authors’ contributions provide ample support for Baser and Morgan’s (2008) assessment of the
political side of CD, cited above. Politics emerge starkly in Watson and Khan’s analysis of CD for education sector
reform in Pakistan. The power shifts created by decentralization were keys to creating incentives for local officials
to support reforms and to care about citizens’ views on the quality of education service delivery. The resulting
political ownership contributed to the success of the two reform programs. Similarly, the PRSP in Tanzania, as
Morgan et al. document, benefited from high-level political support, which led to the placement of the reform
management unit within the government, thereby providing the reformers the necessary bureaucratic clout to
advance the PRSP agenda and achieve results.
In Brazil and PNG, politics affected CD in several ways. First, the two countries’ democratic governance
structures provided the space necessary for civil society actors to operate independently, mobilize larger
constituencies, and build their capacities. As is well recognized, such space is not uniformly available in the
developing world. Second, in both cases, politics shaped the CD agendas of the actors involved. In Brazil, COEP’s
founders responded to a political opening that placed social equity and poverty issues in the public eye, and COEP
employed those issues to recruit members across sectors, attract resources, and expand its capacity to engage in
social action, eventually throughout the entire country. Hauck notes that in PNG, the limited penetration of the
state’s service delivery in the country’s rural hinterlands contributed to a state-society divide that reinforced
political fragility. Churches, with their strong local roots, were able to bridge that divide, both by providing health
and education services, and by building the capacity of local communities through the creation of social capital.
Social capital helped communities to increase social cohesion and mitigate conflicts.
Brinkerhoff’s analysis of CD in fragile states emphasizes the interplay between donor and country politics, and
the impacts on how CD is conceived and implemented. The politics of humanitarian and post-conflict interventions

5
Grindle made this observation over 10 years ago (1997).

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in fragile states often lead to outcomes that, ironically, have detrimental effects on sustainable local capacity.6
Brinkerhoff’s CD model sheds light on these dilemmas and offers some suggestions for coping with them.

Implications for practice

All of the contributions in the symposium hold implications for CD practice. The systems perspective shows that no
single factor or constituent element—incentives, financial support, trained staff, knowledge, organizational
structure—can by itself explain the development of capacity. Thus, narrow interventions, such as staff training, are
not likely to make a significant difference in performance unless they can create opportunity space or leverage that
can shift actors’ behaviors. As the Pakistan education sector case reveals, among the challenges to CD was that
country officials tended to concentrate on training with little attention to other supporting factors necessary for
progress on improved capacity for education service delivery.
Having a detailed CD strategy or design may be counterproductive. Systems thinking postulates that the
dynamics of change that facilitate CD are more emergent than identifiable ahead of time. A CD intervention may
need, particularly at the starting stages of its life, several different approaches that explore the way forward. The
future, particularly in the medium- and long-term, is likely to be inherently unknowable, a question of probabilities
and possibilities, rather than certainties. Starting with ‘big bet’ guesses about CD ends and means may not turn out
to lead in productive directions. The COEP case, for example, provides a remarkable contrast to donor-supported
CD programs. Schnell and Saxby show that COEP’s capacity grew through emergence and exploitation of evolving
opportunities in line with the collective vision of the network’s membership instead of pursuing pre-established
goals.
The two country cases of building capacity through large donor-designed programs, Pakistan and Tanzania,
demonstrate that during implementation it is possible to accommodate the emergent nature of CD by focusing early
on identifying local champions for change, and by allowing for flexibility, learning, and adaptation within the
bureaucratic confines of donor procedures and regulations. Critics of donor agencies often underestimate the extent
to which creative and entrepreneurial officials in those agencies can work within organizational constraints and
‘bend the rules’ to expand the possibilities for enabling country-led, emergent CD.
Systems thinking also leads to a reconsideration of most of the current capacity tools and assessment
frameworks now in use. Results-based management and other output-centered approaches may not fit the complex
process needs of CD. As Brinkerhoff points out, the pressures on donors for benchmarks and measurable short-term
progress push CD toward lower risk activities that lend themselves to being counted. Monitoring and evaluation that
concentrate on tabulating these indicators close off options for learning and adaptation. Yet the ECDPM model and
the four country cases in this symposium indicate that the hard-to-measure capacity intangibles are equally
important, perhaps even more than ‘countable’ CD activities.7

CONCLUSIONS
The contributions to this symposium offer suggestive evidence that conventional conceptions of capacity and CD
miss much of the dynamics and interactions that result in increased capacity to achieve results, perform, and cope
with complex change. The question for outsiders is how to learn from such cases to inform the design and
implementation of externally supported CD efforts. One clear conclusion is that CD design and implementation
need to recognize the fallacy of one-best-way approaches, to incorporate flexibility and learning, and to pay
attention to the specificities of context. These appear to be lessons that must perennially be relearned, particularly
by newer actors involved in whole-of-government interventions in post-conflict fragile states (see Brinkerhoff,
2008). A second conclusion is that outsiders’ ability to influence CD is highly circumscribed. Even in countries
with high degrees of dependence on resources from the international donor community, international actors are not

6
For a confirmatory analysis of these political dynamics, see Juma (2002).
7
The ECDPM study carried out 16 country cases in total, and they all reinforce this point (see Baser and Morgan, 2008).

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the ‘prime movers’ in terms of the endogenous societal dynamics and processes that define capacity endowments,
the prospects for CD, or development outcomes. Third, the systemic perspective on capacity and CD is important
not because it enables analysts or practitioners to see the whole instead of the parts—no perspective allows such
comprehensiveness, as Burns (2007) persuasively argues—but because it increases understanding of how the parts
interact by clarifying both the boundaries and the linkages among them.

REFERENCES

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Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 30, 2–10 (2010)
DOI: 10.1002/pad

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