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Types of organizational capacity An organization's overall capacity depends upon its resources (human, physical, financial, and technological) and its management (leadership, program and process management, and networking and linkages).
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The international aid community is placing a growing emphasis on developing local capacity as the key to alleviating poverty and hunger in the developing world. Although ensuring the effectiveness of a capacity-building effort requires appropriate use of evaluation, few organizations have implemented a system for monitoring or evaluating the change...
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Citations
... Few authors have described the elements of successful partnership for capacity building in international contexts. One exception is Horton (2003) ...
Why do some governments implement more sustainability practices than others? Based on a national survey of U.S. cities, this article finds moderate levels of sustainability efforts and capacity in U.S. cities; about one-third of the sustainability practices identified in this article have been implemented. The authors conclude that, first, capacity building is a useful conceptual focus for understanding sustainability implementation in U.S. cities. Capacity building involves developing technical and financial support and increasing managerial execution. Second, sustainability is strongly associated with managerial capacity, which includes establishing sustainability goals, incorporating goals in operations, and developing a supportive infrastructure. Third, getting stakeholders involved furthers the capacity for sustaining sustainability efforts. Citizen involvement is strongly associated with securing financial support for sustainability.
Enhancing impacts of international development interventions has become a central issue of the twenty-first century. Conventional monitoring and evaluation (M&E) tools either focus on efficiency (output-to-input relationships) or strive to demonstrate a logical progression from specific actors and factors of an intervention to development impacts (inputs => activities => outputs => outcomes => impacts). However, in complex adaptive systems there is neither such a linear results chain nor can impacts be unambiguously attributed to an actor or a factor. Therefore, alternative ways of doing M&E focus on outcomes - the changes in behaviour and social relations - rather than on impacts, such as poverty reduction, environmental protection and social inclusion. Innovation systems thinking, particularly in renewable natural resource, agriculture and rural development, informs that the dominant paradigm of impact assessment should be complemented by social innovation assessment, providing research and development actors with critical learning lessons. This paper integrates two distant bodies of literature - the literature on impact assessment of research and development interventions, and the literature on social psychology of assessing learning and innovations. Based on case studies of a series of projects implemented in India and Nepal under DFID's 11-year Renewable Natural Resources Research Strategy (RNRRS) programme between 1995 and 2006, a social innovation assessment tool was developed and implemented. The tool includes questions about critical incidents and modes of stakeholder interactions to be ranked on a four-point scale depending on how often the statements apply to the respondents' work environments. The social innovation assessment provides critical learning lessons for social innovation generation and overall performance improvement in collaborative research and development interventions at the organisational, network and system levels.
