Capacity Development & Technical Cooperation

The Asian Development Bank developed a set of tools designed to o serve decision making and overall operational planning at the strategic level, helping to find answers to questions such as the following:

• What explains the present capacity situation in sector organizations, and what does that mean for the options for CD?
• Is there a local demand for CD and change that is bigger than the resistance to change?
• Is there local capacity to manage a CD process?
• How can local stakeholders design an output-focused CD process?
• Given the local situation, how can external development partners support CD?

The dynamics of a dialogue, analysis, and formulation process related to CD must guide the use of the instruments, not the other way around.

A central argument of these frameworks is that CD must be owned by those whose capacity is undergoing development. An obvious, but not always respected consequence of this is that external partners such as funding agencies cannot drive or push CD through. They can support, encourage, and stimulate CD processes, but they cannot “do” CD.

This approach illustrates that an initial problem situation is transformed through a process to a new, less problematic situation, which will be the starting point for a new cycle. The tools provided are:

Setting the Stage: Delimiting the Sector Organizational Capacity

1. Setting the Stage: Delimiting the Sector

This tool allows an initial mapping of the sector organizations that would have to be involved in a CD process. It helps to avoid a too narrow—or too broad—set of organizations to be included. 

2. Scanning the Institutional and Political Economy Context

This tool supports an analysis of the context factors that will drive or constrain CD in a sector or an organization. The tool is intended to provide inputs for strategic level decision making.

3. Assessing Organizational Capacity

This summary tool can help to check whether critical assessment areas have been considered.

4. Sector Governance Assessment

Sector performance and capacity depends critically on adequate governance, accountability, and transparency. This tool allows mapping of the existing governance set up.

5. Stakeholder and Actor Analysis: CD Readiness

The level of dissatisfaction with the present situation and the perception of costs involved in CD and change depends on the interests, the power, and the voice of different stakeholders and actors. This tool allows a mapping of these interests and resources, and serves strategic decision making.

6. Partners' Role in CD Processes

In the context of external support to CD, it is important that all partners are aware of the roles they can and should play to maintain and strengthen local ownership of the CD or change process. This tool helps all involved partners to consider and discuss their roles in detail.

7. CD Change Management Design

This tool is for planning purposes and allows users to detail typical tasks and responsibilities in change processes. It is helpful at the operational level by prompting users to identify the persons who will be in charge of different aspects of CD processes.

8. Self-Assessment of Change Capacity

This tool helps people who will be key change agents and managers to assess their capacity to manage the process in terms of resources, skills, external and internal commitment, and links to key stakeholders.

9. Sequencing and Scoping of CD and Reform

It is not possible to generalize about how best to sequence and scope CD processes, but a number of factors have to be considered. These reflect the strategic scenario, which some of the previous tools have helped clarify. The sequencing/scoping tool brings all of this together.

10. Logical Design of CD Processes and Support to CD

This tool is the well-known logical framework approach adapted to the logic of output-oriented

CD. It serves to avoid the limited focus on inputs (and particularly inputs of funding agencies) that has plagued so many CD efforts supported by external funding agencies. The tool allows an operational formulation of specific CD processes and support to these processes.

See also the ADB Practical Guide to Capacity Development in a Sector Context