Developing the Collective Change Capacity of Societies

Over 3,000 development officials have gathered in Busan, South Korea, this week for an important forum on aid effectiveness. According to Vice President of the World Bank Institute Sanjay Pradhan, who is attending the event, capacity development has yet to attain its full potential for changing societies.

Capacity development is all about change, making it an exciting and dynamic concept that is all too often seen as stayed and technocratic.

“In the name of capacity development, we are doing very passive standard things that don’t make change happen,” said Mr Pradhan. “Capacity development should be about developing the capacity, the collective change capacity of society, to achieve high levels of development outcome.”

“That’s not a technocratic issue, that’s a change management issue. That’s a very exciting, inspirational issue,” he added.

Developing capacity is therefore as much to do with working with parliaments, citizens, civil society, and the media to stimulate the change process, as it is about strengthening the machinery and processes of government to deliver better services. Working together and cooperation are powerful means of changing the status quo, according to Mr Pradhan, who will be taking these messages to the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness being hosted in Busan, South Korea, from the 29 November to 1 December.

The World Bank Institute recently changed its approach to capacity development as it needed to achieve stronger results in fighting poverty. The Bank wanted to get away from the traditional model of delivering training and transferring methodologies from the North to the South.

In future, the Bank is looking to support more South-South exchanges of information, similar to the ‘twinning’ approach adopted by the European Commission, and work to bolster citizen empowerment through the use of new technologies.

“We need to first start with: Who are the stakeholders, the change agents in the country? And how we can build their collective capacity to make change happen?” said Mr Pradhan.

These principles are encapsulated in the Bank’s ‘Open Aid Partnership’ which emphasises transparency of development assistance, public budgets and service delivery as critical to encouraging citizens to engage and shape the future of aid.

One of the main components of this Open Aid Partnership is the Bank’s Mapping for Results Initiative which literally pin-points World Bank financed projects on maps. So if partner country representatives or citizens want to know if the bank is spending money on education projects in areas of low literacy levels – they can easily find out.

The Bank is working to expand this initiative to map all donor projects so that citizens can see where aid spending is going, and invite them to give feedback using mobile phone technology.

“Modern technology,” said Mr Pradhan, “can introduce transparency for results that we couldn’t think of earlier.”