Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropology. In this introduction, we outline the growing use of the idea of ‘capacity building’ within and beyond development settings, and highlight mechanisms by which it gains footholds in both policy and practice. This special issue centres and questions its histories, assumptions, intentions and enactments in order to bring ethnographic attention to the promises it entails. By bringing together cases from different sectors and continents, the collection pursues capacity building’s self-evident character, opening up what capacities themselves are thought to be. By not taking capacity building’s promises for granted, the articles collected here have two aims: to interrogate the means of capacity building’s ubiquity, and to develop critical purchase on its persuasive power.

This article explores the concept of capacity building from the perspective of Haitian nationals working in international development aid in Port-au-Prince. Capacity building is often portrayed as imparting knowledge and skills through education and training in order to bring about development for a better future; however, the ways in which capacity building efforts also promote particular kinds of sociality and relationality often go overlooked. By examining the relationships of moun pa’m [my people] as part of a broader moral framework of being and belonging in Haiti, this article reconsiders the meanings and practices of capacity building for Haitian aid practitioners. As intermediaries, expected to both build their own capacities and impart those capacities to development project beneficiaries, local aid practitioners must determine which capacities they will build as they decide what and who can be relied upon in the future.

As the twenty-first century gets underway, people have been experimenting with many forms of political organization. In Northeast Brazil, that experimental spirit led to the creation of the Water Pact, a process involving more than eight thousand participants through a series of public promise-making rituals in which they made pledges to care for water, attending to the specificities of their own context. The Pact gathered those promises into a multi-scalar formation that, the organizers believed, would yield the necessary resources to address the state’s water problems. The Pact would break with an unsuccessful history of infrastructural and legal reforms concerning deep-water access in the state of Ceará. This article examines how that collective was produced, what its constituent units were and how the logic of aggregation guided practices leading to its coalescence. My purpose is to re-examine the aggregate as a quantitative form of capacity that should be qualitatively reconsidered.

Capacity building in biomedical research ethics review has been a European priority since the early 2000s. Prompted by the increase in data originating in internationally sponsored trials in emerging economies, a range of capacity building initiatives were put in place in the field of ethical review to ensure the protection of human subjects participating in research. Drawing on fieldwork with the Forum for Ethical Review Committees in the Asian and Western Pacific Region, I explore two distinct forms taken by capacity building within that organization to support and train members of ethics review committees. The first, with an emphasis on standards and measurability, takes as its priority international accountability for clinical trial research. The second explores how the organization goes about persuading trainees to see and do ‘ethics’ differently. This distinction between forms of capacity allows me to explore what will count as ‘success’ in research ethics capacity building.

Foreign aid programmes have long targeted Bolivia for ‘capacity building’ at the level of institutional democratic channels and the state legal system. By contrast, this article examines a shift in donor priorities from reforming public institutions to workshops targeting interpersonal and social communication through capacitación or skill-set building aimed at changing individual behaviour and values. I argue that the conversatorio – or model dialogue – is the quintessential space of capacitación towards those ends. Yet, as I show, conversatorios also become a space of contestation as participants challenge not only the framing of political issues, but also the very techniques of negotiation, deliberation and political subject formation proposed in these ‘capacity building’ spaces. Conversatorios unmask competing political stakes and expectations of state–citizen relations as sceptical participants revalorize demonized capacities.

This article examines the concept of health worker capacity building as it is used to facilitate the integration of social and clinical community health services. Focusing on the Community-based Health Planning and Services initiative in Ghana, this article calls into question the efficacy of approaches to capacity building which emphasize technical requirements over empowering health workers to actively engage with their communities on matters of health and wellbeing. Instrumental conceptualizations of health worker capacity building generate blueprints for social mobilization that only partially address community health needs, and produce new relationships of brokerage between health workers. These phenomena facilitate a discussion as to how transformative versions of health worker capacity building might be integrated into health sector bureaucracies.

This article examines how institutions mobilize the transitive capacity of concepts and categories to articulate and fulfil their professional functions. In my analysis, I draw on the everyday institutional practices of two organizations, SOS Children’s Villages and Supportive Housing, to illustrate how personal and professional domains are intertwined. Through ethnographic vignettes, I argue that organizational capacities to shape the social in the domain of caring work are achieved through the knowledge practices of professionals and experts, as they negotiate the ‘mothering’ and ‘home’. The institutions studied, in fulfilling personal roles for individual clients, ‘step in’ for the absence of other persons. Such person-oriented goals pose challenges to organizational practices and professional values, ultimately straining the capacities of these institutions to sustain themselves.

This article examines the legacies of a missionary organization’s project to assist the transition of the Amahuaca and others in Peruvian Amazonia into permanent communities. The central aim of this state-sponsored project was to bring Amahuaca people into the ‘modern world’ and allow them to participate as productive members of Peruvian society. I take their approach of ‘intercultural community work’ as an early manifestation of ‘capacity building’ projects in the region. By examining the contrasting ways such transition projects have been framed by the organizers and participants over time, points of comparison can be identified between an Amerindian conceptualization of ‘transformation’ and the way ‘transformation’ is understood to be central to ‘capacity building’ projects within a contemporary United Nations Development Programme [UNDP] framework. I argue that it is critical to examine the transformative impulses of capacity building projects in relation to how change is conceptualized by those involved.

The last decades have seen an explosion of capacity building efforts in and among development organizations. Infused with a sense of vague universality, capacity building presents itself as a term of encompassment, which is easily subjected to anthropological critique. Here, however, I ask what happens if, rather than delimiting the term, it is extended even further than imagined by its advocates. To explore this question, the article engages in a lateral comparison, which moves between the worlds of Cambodian nannies and bargirls and those of ministry bureaucrats working at the intersection of international development and Cambodian government. This juxtaposition makes visible both the specificity of capacity building’s claims and its blind spots, and it helps us to understand some of what causes them. The lateral movement brings into view a set of incongruent capacities developed by people as creative responses to the divergent demands made upon them by different worlds.