Challenging Capacity Building: Comparative Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Sue Kenny and Matthew Clarke (Editors)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 282
• Series: Rethinking International Development
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Tables......Page 8
List of Contributors......Page 9
Part I Capacity Building and
Community Development:
Challenging Rhetoric and
Practice......Page 14
1 Introduction......Page 16
2 Developing Capacities and Agency
in Complex Times......Page 34
3 Community Capacity Building:
Critiquing the Concept in
Different Policy Contexts......Page 54
4 Capacity Building and Community
Development......Page 80
Part II Practical Challenges of Capacity
Building......Page 98
5 Emergent Drivers for Building and
Sustaining Capacity in Australian
Indigenous Communities......Page 100
6 Re-imagining Capacity Building
When Participation is Constrained:
Illegal Burmese Migrants in
Thailand......Page 125
7 The Solomon Islands: Conflict and
Capacity......Page 146
8 Capacity Building in Indonesia:
Building What Capacity?......Page 169
9 Capacity Building and Urban
Regeneration in Dublin, Ireland......Page 198
10 Capacity Building and Community
Power......Page 224
11 Transition Towns and Community
Capacity Building......Page 242
12 Conclusion: Critical Capacity
Building......Page 261
Index......Page 271