Home : Community Economic Development : World Urban Forum : The Capable City
9. Implications for Capacity Building
Capacity building involves a variety of elements usually including financial assistance, technical assistance, peer exchanges, and access to information and decision processes.
Financial Assistance
As identified above, resources must be invested in order to build capacity for better urban governance, particularly at a regional or watershed scale. For developing country cities or those in transition, such funding may be available from the multi-lateral banks, donors and regional banks. Such banks usually provide loans for infrastructure. Increasingly, donor agencies are seeing the value of providing funds for planning and capacity building to accompany the bank loans. As the multi-laterals and donors almost always operate through the national governments, it may be a lengthy process for cities to obtain resources for their efforts. One strategy to speed the process is to develop proposals linking capacity building efforts for regional cooperation to infrastructure projects that are already approved.
In Canada, planning and capacity building activities are eligible for cost sharing under the Green Municipal Fund and the Federation of Municipalities' funding for demonstration projects.
Technical Assistance
Legal, financial and administrative advice is needed in building new institutional structures, especially those that are based on consensual processes. In addition, expertise on engagement processes and conflict resolution is essential. Teams of technical advisors from all three sectors are needed over a long period of time to be the most effective. The typical multi-lateral bank approach of providing technical assistance in less than one year periods is neither efficient nor effective in a capacity building project.
Peer Exchanges
Perhaps the most useful learning takes place between teams of peers. Because of the nature of the three models presented above, such teams need to be multi-sectoral. Rather than elected officials or public administrators meeting with their peers from other cities, adopting any of these models would require teams made up of officials, applied academics, NGOs or community based organizations and local businesses. Participating on a field visit to another city to examine their models has positive side benefits. The shared exposure and social learning that takes place increases the trust among the participants and helps build a team that can champion change in their home region.
Access to Information and Decision Making Processes (Equity)
One of the components of capacity building is increasing the equity among members of the cooperative group. Structurally the GVRD, FBC and NRTEE do this by their membership structure and their attempt to work as much as possible by consensus. Equity begins with access to information. Any attempt at building a cooperative affiliation between cities and their neighbors or between different sectors requires ready access to the same information. Thus capacity building begins with improving this access. A highly imaginative and successful project to improve the access of groups in developing countries to the Internet was pioneered by the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Winnipeg, Canada. xviii It is a model that would work elsewhere.
Access to information, however, is not enough. Disparities in power between small villages, small businesses, minority group members, the poor, women, NGOs and community based organizations and large cities, elites, large organizations and big businesses exist in every region. Effective (professional) facilitation is needed to bridge these disparities and often help is needed to amplify the voices of the disadvantaged groups so that their opinions are heard and respected. This is a twofold process – assisting marginal voices to articulate their views and enhancing the capacity of existing institutions to hear their messages and respond appropriately.
xviii. See www.iisd.ca. 
The project was originally called Spinning the Web and was supported by IDRC and CIDA.