by Rachel Douglas-Jones and Justin Shaffner, editors of Hope and Insufficiency: Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

We open our new edited collection Hope and Insufficiency by traveling the world in workshops. Three capacity building events, ranging from Paramaribo to Addis Ababa, sketched as thumbnails, form our introductory paragraph. These three events, drawn from thousands, simply demonstrate the breadth of topics to which it is applied. Capacity building, or its more recent iteration as capacity development, is, we argue, both ubiquitous and under-theorised within the social sciences. The title of our book identifies characteristics of capacity building’s intervention: as we put it, hope and insufficiency interplay in a way that makes the idea of capacity building persuasive.

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