Capacity for what?

Earlier this year I was in Vietnam working on capacity building for local government concerning participatory planning and reviewing a new curriculum for planners education at undergraduate level.  The issue arising is the increasing demands, especially with the additional challenge of climate change in a major delta area.  At the same time there is no more time for study - so what goes out and what comes in?  The need to be able to innovate and adapt to change becomes a vital area.  The importance of ethics is also increasing in importance as planners often have to mediate between public interest and the pressures of the market.

I have just been to the World Habitat Day celebrations in Brussels. The focus was on urban planning - the theme that UN-HABITAT is promoting in its state of cities report - which is available for download in its abridged form - a welcome initative. The key word coming up is integration, in particular integration with preventative measures linked to climate change and disaster management. I agree, but a major issue is that capacity is already limited to do the often ineffective planning that is a weak response to a vital issue - managing fast growing cities with increasing informality.

The Brussels meeting was hot on the heals of the N-Aerus conference on Open Cities held at IHS in Rotterdam. Again the scale of the challenge was highlighted in terms of growing difference in access to services, made worse with gated communities in countries as diverse as Brazil and Egypt.

The challenge is not just to add additional tasks to often weak organizations, but to radically rethink the work that should be done and also to get rid of the barriers that stop effective action. Many enthusiastic young planners become disillusioned because of work place inertia, lack of politica and manageral support and often also corruption. Add in poor pay levels and it is not surprising that some of potentially the most significant tasks are being done poorly or not at all.  We need to find ways to better tap into human energies and potentials that we build and not to allow them to be sapped away.

Update - what's in a name?

A long time without posting - but the site was specially set up for events in the WUF in Vancouver in 2006. Since then, the issue has not gone away. Unfortunately in many cases a major impediment is the willingness or ability of governmental institutions to pay staff sufficiently to attract and keep good staff.

In the meantime, the terminology has moved on in some circles. "Capacity Development" is the term favored by UNDP, who have been doing a lot of work in the area. The difference in concept is explained as "capacity development" assumes that there is existing capacity to be built on, while "capacity building" does not. This is rather an artificial difference, because most of the use of "capacity building" is in contexts of working with existing capacity. What matters is that useful information can be found under both headings.

http://capacity.org/ is still a very useful site.