Capacity development of CSOs – Long term commitment and short term success

Pictures speak. The results of a photo competition from across the globe ‘Capacity development in pictures’[1] illustrate different perspectives on capacity development ranging from individual empowerment to capacity development through partnerships. What about organisational change? Can we capture organisational development in pictures or should we at least highlight important snapshots or stepping stones of the change process?

Capacity development (CD) of CSOs based on capacity assessments and organisational change plans are long term and multiple-step processes whose impact cannot be observed within the time frame of short – term funding or commitment.Improving organisational effectiveness is an on-going effort that affects the whole organisation.Furthermore, organisational processes develop in relation to each other and organisational capacity can only be built gradually over time. Capacity development interventions often take place at multiple levels in an organisation and include several stages, starting from assessing existing capacities, defining the need for change, gaining commitment for the change process, and implementation of interventions to learning and evaluation. Skipping one of the stages, or having only short term commitment, hinders addressing the causes of capacity gaps, reduces capacity development support to ad hoc interventions, and affects the sustainability of results.

Crucial aspects to understanding changes in the capacity of CSOs are that organisational change is often incremental and it is hard to predict its pace. Thus, it is important to acknowledge that capacity changes are not only about the ‘final’ big changes, but that modest and small changes matter as well. Generating short-term wins is necessary in respect of observable organizational improvements which do then become visible throughout the organisation within a time frame of 6-18 months. Capacity development processes therefore can be usefully divided into intermediary steps related to the long term organisational change that the CD intervention aims to address. Alongside the provision of CD, Support Organisations need to know what ‘capacity development’ would look like at the end of a certain investment of effort and resources. What new abilities are desirable? Possible? Probable?

Paying attention to small changes offers the possibility to keep people informed about the process, to gather constructive feedback about results and short comings of the chosen interventions, to share experiences through dissemination of lessons learned, and to continue dialogue at organisational level about the long term objectives of the support strategies.Such attention requires that organisations have both the opportunity and competence to design their own indicators to map these specific changes. Charting changes in capacity should be kept as simple as possible in order to avoid burdening organisations with complex and time-consuming demands that may lose support. The best is to look at simple and visible illustrations, and to get recipients of capacity development support to articulate clearly what actions do they take now (after the CD support), that they didn’t take before?

Thus, although organisational capacity changes are spread out in time, small changes matter. Sufficient orientation is needed towards appreciating that capacity development is a process and that it is important to have ‘winning situations’ in the short term. Often, finding ways to illustrate these incremental, winning capacity changes are paramount to keeping the long term change process on track and the organization engaged.

Organisational development of CSOs is the main focus of guidance currently being developed for the European Commission. The Guidance is a response to the September 2012 Civil Society Communication which emphasizes the importance of strengthening civil society actors to perform their roles more effectively, particularly local actors. The guidance will be made available later in 2014.Materials from a series of seminars on support to the capacity development of CSOs are available for download.

This posting and the related materials have been produced with the assistance of the European Union. The contents are the sole responsibility of the contractors providing the technical assistance and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union

[1]http://capacity4dev.ec.europa.eu/article/capacity-development-pictures-introducing-winners