Capacity development of CSOs – What was it that went wrong?!

In 1867, the chief engineer of the British Post Office said: “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys”. Thomas J. Warson, president of IBM, stated in 1948: “I think there is a world market for about five computers”. History shows numerous examples of assumptions that appeared to be wrong, leading to strategies that seemed right at the time, but didn’t work out. They provide food for thought and reason to reflect on assumptions and practices. As Capacity Development (CD) practitioners we regularly evaluate the quality of interventions and have to acknowledge that we have to review our assumptions as well. The top 5 ‘what was it that went wrong’ in CD practices provides clues to re-examine assumptions about CD support or to do it differently.

1. BEING IN A RUSH

The ambition of CSOs leaders, the agenda of institutional donors, or unexpected availability of funds, may all speed up the process of identifying capacity needs and designing an approach for capacity support at organisational level. But, being in a rush actually slows down the capacity development process in the end, because shortcuts often decrease the level of ownership of Civil Society actors. CD interventions fail when there is no time to carry out an organizational-wide capacity assessment or to achieve a shared sense of urgency and a shared vision regarding the desired change. Thus, we can see that although it takes time at the beginning, involving elements of awareness-raising so that CSOs get to see a wider ‘horizon’ or possibilities of their future impact, usually leads in the end to better role-related capacity development support.

2. ONE SIZE FITS ALL

The assumption that having done the design of capacity development interventions dozens of times in the past offers enough background to replicate approaches in different contexts adds up to a major risk: namely that the final implementation of CD support doesn’t match the specific organisational capacity development needs. Although globally CSOs do have common characteristics, they also have their own particularities that shape their influence and their specific capacity development demands. Looking into the particularities of CSOs, like the context in which they operate, the way in which they are structured, their stage of development, or their organisational form, provides an indication of the issues that have to be addressed during an assessment or in the design of CD support. Understanding these particularities will make it possible to determine ‘how specific’ capacity development efforts need to be facilitated and supported.

3. CHANGING EXPECTATIONS

Effective capacity development support requires respect for long term processes. This is simply because over a period of time contexts may change, especially in fragile states, and CSOs, or support organisations, may be confronted with staff turnover, changes in the roles of staff members, and variations in the availability of both financial and human resources. These can mean that continuously changing expectations regarding CD interventions may have a severe impact on the stability of the support process and on CD results. A Ukraine case study [1] showed that results may fall back when either the context and demand or both change. To address the concern of role swaps and changing expectations, capacity development support needs to be well structured and well documented and might include exit interviews with people who leave the organisation to assure transfer of information regarding the support process. To anticipate changes in the context, the design of CD support should provide space for flexibility and offer the opportunity to adapt to changing conditions. This requires regular updates to the management of the intervention and a contingency budget for unforeseen situations.

4. ABSENCE OF GUIDANCE

The importance of a Working Group, or Change Committee, to guide the CD process and to provide arrangements regarding the follow up is often underestimated. However, absence of such a group influences CD results. CD interventions and capacity changes need to be designed, facilitated and monitored. A powerful group of people representing strategic and operational levels of the organisation can, in collaboration with the support structures, provide direction and effectively create conditions throughout the process that support the desired organisational change.

5. IT ONLY TAKES MONEY

For donor organisations it is common to hear the following refrain from CSOs: "we know what we’re doing, but we just need more resources to do it better and bigger!" So, commonly capacity development support is simply channelled as financing to CSOs, in the belief that CSOs are then empowered to buy-in whatever support they need to see them through a process of organizational change. However, looking back at organisational change processes, the funding has often proven to be of limited meaning to capacity development of CSOs if it is not related to a well thought through identification of needs to trigger the desired change. That change might be different organisational behaviour, restructuring the organization, or there might be a need for innovative approaches such as mentor match-making and twinning mechanisms to support organisational effectiveness. Good knowledge of organisational change processes and the ‘market’ for CD support allows for the identification of the ‘right’ means that can best facilitate organizational change in a specific situation. Thus, those involved in the design of CS support interventions, and particularly the resources required to implement them, need to be able to fine-tune the analysis of the demand and supply to ascertain if an injection of just funding is indeed going to generate the required change.

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] Project supporting the application of a Sector Wide Approach (SWAp) in Agriculture and Rural Development (ARD) within the context of WTO accession and the ENP Action Plan between October 2009 and December 2011.