Document(s) 7 of 15

This chapter summarizes what the ECD Project team has learned about how organizations develop capacities and how managers can facilitate and advance capacity development processes in their organizations. Organizational capacity development efforts are seldom systematically planned and managed. Traditionally, capacity development programs were led by external agencies and focused on developing the capacities of individuals, projects, or units within the organization. The evaluation studies pointed to several limitations of this traditional, piecemeal approach and helped the project participants outline an alternative, holistic approach to developing an organization’s capacities. We present a number of principles on which this approach is based, and identify steps that an organization can take to develop its own capacity and benefit from external sources of support. Examples from our evaluation studies highlight the value of working towards a more holistic approach to organizational capacity development.

Trends in Capacity Development

The evaluation studies confirmed the observation that capacity development in research and development organizations is seldom systematically planned or managed. Capacities are usually built up over time as staff members are trained and gain experience and as formal procedures are established. Where concerted efforts have been made to develop capacity, they have often been externally motivated and led.

Development agencies and donors have used numerous mechanisms to deliver capacity development programs. As mentioned in the previous chapter, early attempts often focused on ‘hardware’, such as the construction of facilities and the provision of basic equipment. Technical advisors from the North were often sent to lead capacity development programs in the South. Later on, capacity development efforts shifted to focus on ‘software’, including staff knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Major investments were made in personnel development through the provision of university-level education for developing country nationals in industrialized nations.

Formal education was later replaced with an emphasis on short-term technical training. Workshops were frequently organized to plan, undertake, or review capacity

development efforts. This resulted in the proliferation of a ‘workshop culture’ among research and development organizations, which increases dependency on external resources (including funds) to convene these meetings and moderators to help plan and facilitate them. External agencies have also supported the dissemination of technical information to professionals in the South through scientific publications and, more recently, access to the Internet.

With increasing frequency, collaborative research and networking projects are being used as capacity development strategies. For example, FSRNET in Viet Nam seeks to build capacity in farming systems research and natural resource management by providing a mechanism for sharing experiences. Multi-disciplinary scientists from various research institutes and universities share their experiences through research, training, workshops, and extension.

In the past, many collaborative projects were based on the assumption that Southern researchers or development workers—the ‘recipients’—would learn from their counterparts in the North—the ‘providers’—and hence, strengthen their scientific and technical capacities while working on the job. More recently, collaborative projects have tended to emphasize joint learning and sharing of experiences. Networks employing various mixes of face-to-face interaction and Internet exchange are greatly expanding possibilities for information exchange and learning within and between the South and the North.

Development agencies—including those who participated in the ECD Project—have employed a variety of these delivery mechanisms in attempts to strengthen the capacities of research and development organizations in the South. However, both client and provider have often been disappointed by the results. The reason for this frustration, and an alternative approach, are presented in the following section.

Moving from a Traditional to a More Holistic Approach to Capacity Development

The traditional approach

Individual and project-level capacities still need to be strengthened in many organizations through the traditional means well known to managers. However, our evaluation studies make it clear that organizational capacities are not developed through training individuals, delivering information, or participating in collaborative projects alone. These can be important components of a capacity development strategy, but only when they address organizational priorities.

The process most frequently used in the past to develop an organization’s capacity began with assessing, or sometimes even assuming, the needs of individual staff members or the needs of individual projects or units. Once these needs were identified, individuals were trained and capacities developed within the project or unit. These capacity development activities at the individual or project level were

assumed to contribute to improved capacity and performance of the organization. Figure 6 illustrates this traditional linear approach.

Figure 6. Underlying logic of the traditional approach to capacity development

The traditional, linear approach to capacity development assumes that the development of individual and project-level capacities will lead to improved organizational capacity and performance.

Bangladesh’s RDRS evaluation study showed that the Service generally used informal procedures to identify the capacity development needs of its staff and had tended to focus on management-level staff (especially women who had no previous training). The capacity development program of RDRS provided formal training in institutes outside of Bangladesh, self-managed distance education, study-oriented field visits, and in-house training conducted by external trainers, which was subsequently replicated by RDRS staff. Capacity development focused on staff training, the improvement of internal organizational systems and procedures, the upgrading of facilities, and the introduction of new technologies.

The traditional approach adopted by RDRS was similar to that of many organizations, where managers believe that upgrading the capacity of the individual will lead to better individual performance, and that this will automatically lead to better performance of the organization as a whole. Our evaluation studies helped us understand that this is not necessarily the case.

Weaknesses of the traditional approach

While training and project support are important, the evaluation studies revealed that they are inadequate for organizational capacity development for several reasons.

Individual staff or project-focused support seldom addresses the organization’s priority needs. Our studies showed that the limited capacity of an individual or of a specific project is seldom the main constraint to an organization’s effectiveness and efficiency. Focusing capacity development on an individual or a project can thus drain resources from high priority areas to lower priority ones.

In the case of the Plant Genetic Center in Ghana, individual training or project-directed capacity development interventions did not always focus on the Center’s highest priority areas of need. Although a high priority was given to staff training and ex situ germplasm conservation (which accounted for 71% of outside technical assistance received by the Center), more important and emerging needs, such as strategic management, germplasm use, and information management, were given a lower emphasis.

A focus on individuals or projects misses the ‘big-picture’ issues facing the organization. Unless they are addressed, these ‘big-picture’ issues will threaten the continuing relevance of research and development organizations and their effectiveness in meeting the needs of their key stakeholders.

For example, after a broad assessment of the needs of the agricultural sector, UNA, Nicaragua asked its traditional departments of soil, water, and forestry to develop an integrated faculty of natural resources management with a watershed focus. The evaluation study revealed that providing staff members with highly specialized technical education abroad was not necessarily giving them the perspective and approaches they needed to improve the management of Nicaragua’s natural resources.

Trained individuals may not find an environment conducive to the use of their new knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Training may not be the most effective means of building organizational capacities. Individuals who have been trained in specialized technical skills or learned new approaches to their work often return to their home organization to find that the equipment needed to use their new skills is missing, or that their managers do not understand or, even worse, do not agree with, their new thinking and approach. They may also find that the newly acquired, highly specialized disciplinary skills or knowledge are of limited use in addressing the most important problems in their home environment.

Returning to the case of Nicaragua, many University professionals were educated overseas. When they returned home, they found that much of their knowledge could not be applied because they lacked essential equipment. Moreover, addressing the country’s environmental problems called for multidisciplinary teamwork rather than individual scientific contributions. The training provided did not prepare the University’s academics for group work.

“We need to change capacity development—from support that allows individuals to do their work to support that is focused more on the outcome of their work.”

Ibrahim Khadar

In other cases, returning trainees might not even stay with their organization, as they become more ‘marketable’ and mobile. In Bangladesh, the ability of RDRS to make use of the new skills acquired by their staff through training at IIRR was limited for a variety of reasons. According to the evaluation study, between 30 and 40% of RDRS staff were lured away by higher paying jobs as a result of acquiring new skills. In other cases, changes in staff roles and responsibilities made jobs less attractive and individual staff members or their supervisors were unable or unmotivated to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and skills to their peers.

A focus on individuals and projects may even undermine the organization’s capacity. From our evaluation studies we learned that discrete or sporadic capacity development activities focused on individuals or projects usually contributes little to the overall capacity of the organization. An excessive focus on projects may even undermine the organization’s capacity and performance. In BSU in the Philippines and UNA in Nicaragua, for example, personnel have sometimes been so heavily involved in externally funded projects and activities that they have been diverted away from the basic teaching and research activities they should be doing to fulfill their university’s missions.

Principles of a holistic approach to capacity development

The evaluation studies helped the Project participants identify a number of principles that should be taken into consideration when shaping a process towards adopting a more holistic approach to organizational capacity development.

Lead your own capacity development initiative. Positive local capacity development requires local initiative. An external agency can provide information, training, or other services, but there are no two ways about it: each organization must ultimately take the responsibility for developing its own capacities to meet its own needs. In our organizations, the more successful capacity development efforts were driven by our own managers, and supplemented or supported in various ways by external agencies.

When Cuba’s Ministry of Agriculture was beginning to undertake its reorganization and reorientation of agrarian science and technology institutes, it also initiated a meeting with ISNAR’s New Paradigm Project. The capacity development interventions were designed and prioritized through a negotiated process in which the Cuban partners had the power to influence the content, methodology, and rationale.

Focus on the needs and priorities of the organization as a whole. The capacity of an organization as a whole is greater than the sum of the capacities of its individuals and parts. For this reason, discrete capacity development initiatives that address specific gaps at

the level of individuals or projects can be expected to produce fewer results than a more coherent capacity development effort that identifies and addresses the needs of the organization as a whole. Once priorities of the organization have been established, individual or project-based needs that coincide with the latter can be focused on. Hence, the focus is on the holistic development of the organization, which provides a home for its members and their projects.

“Since this evaluation study, we might now include things like facilitation in our proposals. Perhaps half of our donors will be open to this idea and others will simply not understand or accept it.”

Le Thanh Duong

The evaluation study helped RDRS in Bangladesh to realize that it needs to put mechanisms into place to systematically encourage and facilitate the transfer of knowledge, skills, and changed attitudes acquired by individuals through training to others within the organization. In the past, such a mechanism did not exist and therefore investments in training rarely translated into change or improvement at the organizational level.

Pay attention to the processes of capacity development. Up to this point, we have emphasized the need to focus capacity development on key constraints or opportunities for im-

proving the organization’s performance. But the processes employed to develop capacities are just as important as the goals, and these need to be mastered and managed.

Several of our evaluation studies highlighted the benefits of actively involving staff members and external stakeholders in capacity development processes. In Cuba and the Philippines, it was clear that participatory training events designed to promote self-learning, critical thinking, team-building, and action planning led to greater changes in knowledge, skills, and attitudes than traditional courses in which instructors delivered standard texts to individuals. In the participatory events, trainees became better prepared to use the knowledge and skills acquired, because they gained experience in thinking through ways to adapt and apply the training to their own organizations.

Team-based training—bringing together team members rather than individuals for training events—also helped build support for implementing change in trainees’ home organizations. The Root Crops Center attributed the development of its participatory research capacities to the use of a highly informal and inter-personal working environment. This environment promoted expertise sharing and mentoring among staff and introduced a mechanism for regular research review by its local partner, BSU, and a regional consortium.

Build in monitoring and evaluation from the outset. In capacity development, as in most other development activities, there is a tendency to focus resources and attention first on planning and then on implementation of discrete activities. Monitoring and evaluation become concerns only when the work is well under way, and perhaps nearing completion.

However, it is useful to think about, and plan for, monitoring and evaluation at the beginning of a capacity development initiative. Developing a plan for monitoring and evaluation—deciding what questions to ask, what data to collect, how to analyze and synthesize it, and how to interpret and present the findings—can help managers sharpen their objectives and become more aware of their assumptions. It helps managers to improve their planning and will also indicate what types of data need to be collected at different points in time to monitor progress and evaluate the overall capacity development process and its results.

View capacity development as more than a one-off event. The development of an organization’s capacity is more than a one-off event, it is a process that evolves over a number of years and it requires resources. For this reason, the development and maintenance of good working relationships between the various parties involved in a capacity development effort is crucial to its overall success. In Ghana, for example, the ‘client’ and

the ‘provider’ invested time and resources in developing good personal and working relationships over a 20-year period. This paid off handsomely over time.

Engage stakeholders in the capacity development process. In our experience, stakeholder involvement was an essential part of the success of our capacity development efforts. Stakeholder involvement is important for identifying appropriate new directions and building commitment for change. National stakeholders should be involved in assessing the organization’s needs and setting its priorities. They can also be important sources of resources or partners for accomplishing the organization’s objectives.

Some of the evaluation studies identified stakeholders at the national, regional, and international levels. In some cases, the relationships with stakeholders extended to actually building the capacity of stakeholder organizations. RDRS in Bangladesh strengthened the capacities of the community-based groups they worked with, and this worked towards achieving the organization’s mission, which is to empower the rural poor politically, socially, and economically.

Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta Farming Systems R&D Institute also pointed to stakeholder engagement as a key element of its capacity development process. This included building relationships with its clients and being increasingly responsive to their needs, developing a common approach and agenda with other national research organizations through networking efforts, and improving cooperation and coordination with its international donors.

Cultivate adequate political support and preserve your autonomy. Political support and autonomy are important interrelated factors. In public organizations, any significant capacity development effort, which involves such things as strategic planning, restructuring, or training abroad, will require the support of decision-makers in high-level positions such as ministers of agriculture, environment, or finance.

In Cuba, all key decisions taken during strategic planning for the country’s agricultural research were taken with the involvement and support of the Vice Minister of Agriculture. The development of capacity in agrifood chain analysis within IIP was driven by support from the Institute’s Director. Similarly, in FARENA in Nicaragua, the major decisions on curricula, structure, and training abroad required the approval of the parent university, UNA.

The degree of autonomy of the organization strongly influences the management’s room for maneuver in capacity development. The more autonomous the organization, the greater the control managers have over capacity development processes. For example, Ghana’s Plant Genetic Center has been able to make greater advances in capacity development since it became semi-autonomous. In particular, this has resulted in a direct funding allocation to the Center from the Government,

“We need to make distinctions between what capacities we can and cannot develop. We cannot do everything at the same time and need to make choices.”

Ibrahim Khadar

and the Center now has greater control over its budgetary resources.

While autonomy gives managers the budgetary and hierarchical authority they need to make decisions, it can have another connotation. It allows the organization to carry out its own analyses, to chart its own direction and, in turn, to pursue its goals.

In this sense, autonomy not only enables capacity development to take place and but also impacts on its process.

Establish an environment that is conducive to learning and change. Disruptive changes in the external environment can pose serious problems for organizations. But our evaluation studies show that major disruptions can also create positive change. Because of a series of natural disasters in the Philippines in the 1990s, root crops became an important source of food security, and the Root Crops Center was able to demonstrate the relevance of its research activities.

On the internal front, a manager who wishes to promote capacity development should make every effort to foster openness when discussing learning, strengths and weaknesses, and when redirecting efforts. RDRS in Bangladesh encourages and facilitates returnees from training courses to share their new learning with fellow colleagues. Senior managers, for example, are encouraged to organize and conduct similar training for their colleagues back home. This practice encourages the staff to transfer their learning to others. However, the process depends largely on incentives provided by the organization and the personal commitment and motivation of managers.

Steps to Promote a Holistic Approach in the Development of Organizational Capacity

There is no single recipe or blueprint for developing an organization’s capacity. Capacity development involves learning and experimentation and what works well in one place may fail in another. For example, the participatory strategies employed jointly by Cuba’s Ministry of Agriculture and the New Paradigm Project for strategic planning and capacity development were attempted in other countries in the region. In some cases the results were disappointing, due in large part to the frequent turnover of managers and the discontinuity of national policies.

Keeping in mind the futility of searching for universal formulas, our experiences and reflections from the evaluation studies suggest the value of going through the steps listed below. Given the nature of capacity development processes, and the frequent changes that organizations are exposed to today, managers should not expect to implement these steps in a neat sequence as presented. Nevertheless, our experience suggests there is some logic in the order presented, which is mirrored in recent research on organizational strategy and development in a wide variety of organizations and settings. Figure 7 illustrates the six steps we propose to foster a more holistic approach to capacity development.

Figure 7. Steps in a holistic approach to capacity development

The steps are presented in an ideal sequence. In practice, however, capacity development efforts often begin at different points in the sequence, skip steps, or cycle back and forth between steps.

Step 1. Monitor the external environment to identify needs and opportunities for organizational change

Political, social, technological, or economic changes may drastically alter the organization’s goals, focus, and processes for capacity development. As highlighted in the previous chapter, entry into the global marketplace, collapse of traditional markets and partnerships, decentralization of the national government, and reduction in external funding support were some of the drastic changes experienced by our organizations. In today’s turbulent times, it is essential that organizations monitor external trends and develop strategies for coping with changing opportunities and threats.

In the late 1990s, the New Paradigm Project organized a national training workshop in Cuba to share technology foresight methodologies for identifying current and emerging technological demands in agrifood chains. The knowledge gained allowed participants to begin studying some agrifood chains in the country. The study carried out by IIP provided crucial information for refocusing the Institute’s research. As a result of the study, the Institute increased its focus on appropriate technology for the emerging small farm sector and on new swine rations based on locally available inputs.

Step 2. Review the organization’s strategy

Capacity development needs are best identified within the framework of the organization’s strategy. As the organization monitors its external environment, it will need to reassess its mission, objectives, strategies, and programs periodically. All the study teams found that it had, or would have, been useful to carry out a strategic planning exercise before embarking on strengthening particular capacities.

In Cuba, the Directorate of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Agriculture coordinated a strategic planning process for all the country’s research institutes. This provided a solid basis for planning specific capacity development initiatives.

In the other countries, where such exercises were not carried out, the project team felt that an organizational assessment should have been undertaken before embarking on future capacity development initiatives. This would have helped the participating organizations target capacities that were essential for achieving their objectives.

Step 3. Identify capacity needs and plan for capacity development

As already mentioned, plans for capacity development are ideally based on an understanding of the external environment and a well-formulated strategy for the

organization. Developing a monitoring and evaluation system as part of a capacity development plan will help managers assess how capacity development contributes to the organization’s short- or long-term plans. In this way, capacity development can support the organization’s strategy. In fact, few of the participating organizations have well-developed mechanisms for monitoring the external environment or for strategic planning and management.

Our studies revealed these to be crucial areas of managerial capacity requiring further strengthening. Nevertheless, most of our organizations did some sort of needs assessment. For example, RDRS in Bangladesh routinely assesses its training needs. Ghana’s Plant Genetic Center bases its priorities for capacity development on an informal needs assessment carried out with a partner organization, GRENEWECA. During the initial planning phase of a capacity development effort, it is important to plan for subsequent monitoring and evaluation. Thinking through how the capacity development effort can be monitored and evaluated can help planners sharpen their goals and clarify and assess their assumptions. This kind of ‘ex ante’ analysis can help improve the plans as well as indicating what types of data need to be collected to permit adequate monitoring and evaluation later on.

Step 4. Negotiate external support

Even with the best planning, an organization may not have sufficient resources of its own to build up its capacities as quickly as might be desired. Some external support for training, workshops, collaborative projects, or basic equipment was provided to all the national organizations participating in this project. In most cases, national organizations drew on many different sources of external support for capacity development. It is important to note that external support was provided not only by foreign ‘donors’ but also by a variety of national or local entities. Ghana’s Plant Genetic Center was largely supported by the Government of Ghana, while the Root Crops Center in the Philippines was supported by BSU.

Regardless of the source, organizations need to negotiate the terms of support to ensure that capacity development efforts are, in fact, directed towards meeting the organization’s priorities. Planning and review missions involving both national and international partners can improve the targeting of capacity development interventions, especially where there has been no formal strategic planning exercise.

Step 5. Implement and manage the capacity development process

Nothing can be quite so demoralizing and harmful to an organization’s performance as a thorough planning exercise that is not followed by serious implementation. All

the studies concluded that effective management is essential for organizational capacity development. Developing organizational capacities involves organizational change processes that need to be effectively managed to keep them on track and moving forward. If effective management does not exist in an organization, management development should be a component of the capacity development strategy.

Step 6. Monitor and evaluate the capacity development process

Organizational strategies must remain dynamic and flexible since an organization’s needs and priorities can change. For example, the priorities of the Root Crops Center in the Philippines changed several times while the Center was working with the UPWARD network to develop its capacity in participatory research.

Monitoring and periodic evaluation of the capacity development process in the light of changing organizational priorities is a key source of information that can help managers readjust their activities. Monitoring and evaluation can also ensure that capacity development is actually contributing to the organization’s capacity and performance, and not draining resources from higher priority areas. Monitoring provides assurance that efforts to develop organizational capacity are tracked, successes and weaknesses are identified, and efforts redirected as needed.

In most of the study organizations, monitoring of capacity development and change and communicating the results promoted capacity development by motivating management, staff, and external stakeholders to support the effort and by identifying areas needing greater attention. Documenting and sharing results helped inform people within the organization of progress and promoted staff and stakeholder involvement in the change process.

In Viet Nam, the Mekong Delta Farming Systems R&D Institute used self-assessment workshops in its evaluation process. This approach helped develop a shared understanding of the evaluation process and goals with participants. The process also helped gain commitment from Institute staff to the evaluation and its results, and stimulated enthusiasm to participate in planning for the organization’s future. The Institute’s management has decided to follow up the study with a number of other self-assessment activities.

Take-Home Messages

Managers should move toward a more holistic approach to capacity development, based on a number of important principles. An organization should lead its own

capacity development efforts so that it meets its own needs. Capacity development should target the needs of the organization as a whole. Once the priorities of the organization have been established, individual or project-based needs can be focused on. The processes used to develop capacities are as important as its goals. They therefore need to be mastered and well managed.

A holistic approach to capacity development requires a comprehensive, continuous, and logical process that begins with strategic planning and is followed by assessment of capacity needs, then planning for capacity development interventions (including such activities as training, acquisition of equipment, and collaborative research projects), and finally, periodic monitoring and evaluation. Managers will need to cultivate support among the organization’s stakeholders to carry this process through. Senior managers and political authorities are especially important because they usually sanction major changes that may take place within an organization.

Developing organizational capacity requires financial and other resources, which may need to come from governmental agencies, donor agencies, networks, or other national level stakeholders. The terms of support should be negotiated in such a way that the activities truly meet the organization’s needs rather than the interests of the external agencies. External agencies should be willing to encourage and support their partners in implementing this holistic approach to capacity development.

‘Learning by doing’ is fundamental to capacity development. Therefore, managers who wish to develop their organizations’ capacities should seek to create an environment that is open to self-criticism, reflection, and improvement. Likewise, external agencies that wish to support capacity development efforts should be flexible enough to allow for plans and procedures to be modified in response to changing conditions and accumulated knowledge.

Guide to Further Reading

Much has been written on the inadequacies of past capacity development approaches and, more broadly, past approaches to technical assistance. Much less has been written on what has worked well. Much of what has been written on capacity development strategies is in the ‘gray literature’ of papers prepared for international development agencies. The CIDA, UNDP, and the Evaluation Unit of IDRC have done particularly interesting work in this area.

A paper by Lusthaus, Adrien, and Perstinger, Capacity Development: definitions, issues and implications for planning, monitoring and evaluation (1999a) identifies a series of development approaches, beginning in the 1950s, that have preceded the emergence of capacity development as a central issue in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The paper by Qualman and Bolger, Capacity development: a holistic approach to sustainable development (1996) summarizes frameworks and strategies for capacity development that emphasize the value of holistic approaches. Guidelines published by UNDP in 1998 present an approach to capacity assessment and development in a systems and strategic management context. A paper on the current conceptualization of capacity development and the implications for practice, prepared in 1999 by Joy for UNDP and the United Nations Children’s Fund, discusses issues for planning and monitoring capacity development. A 1998 paper by Morgan on capacity and capacity development discusses seven strategies for capacity development.

The steps to promote the development of organizational capacity that are presented in this chapter are consistent with contemporary approaches to strategic planning and analysis and organizational development. Grant’s book Contemporary strategy analysis: concepts, techniques, applications (1995) outlines a strategic approach for developing an organization’s capabilities. This approach has been further elaborated by Mabey, Salaman, and Storey (1998).

Useful frameworks for strategic planning are presented by Bryson (1995) and by Blackerby and Blackerby (1994). A 1999 article by Patton on organizational development and evaluation discusses how evaluation can be used to promote organizational development and leadership development.

Several useful frameworks and tools for organizational assessment are presented on the website www.reflect-learn.org. More detailed frameworks are presented in the books by Harrison (1994) and Lusthaus and colleagues (2002) in Organizational assessment: a framework for improving performance.

Those concerned with organizational capacity development can learn a great deal from experiences with evaluation, organizational learning, and change. Interested readers are referred to the ISNAR Discussion Paper on this subject by Horton, Galleno, and Mackay (2003).

Document(s) 7 of 15