Community Capacity Building

Community capacity building is a collaborative process aimed at empowering individuals within a community to address and overcome shared challenges. This process typically involves identifying existing resources, understanding community needs, and strategizing effective responses to issues such as unemployment, inadequate services, or health crises. The capacity of a community refers to the collective resources and willpower available to tackle these problems, which can significantly influence residents' quality of life.

Efforts in community capacity building can occur at three levels: societal, institutional, and individual. Societal capacity building often targets systemic issues within governance structures, while institutional capacity focuses on enhancing the effectiveness of existing organizations. Individual capacity building emphasizes empowering community members through education and advocacy, fostering a shared vision for growth.

Despite its potential benefits, community capacity building faces challenges, including the risk of applying ineffective solutions to unique problems or being perceived as an attempt to pacify discontent. Successful capacity building requires continuity, local engagement, and a commitment to the community's future, ensuring that initiatives are sustainable and genuinely meet the needs of the population.

Published in: 2021

By:

Subject Terms

Community Capacity Building

Abstract

Community capacity building is a process through which individuals in a community can work together to help one another overcome the challenges that the community faces. This can be accomplished in a wide variety of ways, but usually requires that those who are prepared to engage in capacity building work connect with one another, identify what resources the community has available, enumerate the challenges that must be addressed, and then begin to strategize next steps. These next steps are often to find ways to use community resources to either engage directly with challenges, or to use the resources to locate others who can assist with the challenges.

Overview

Every community faces challenges, whether these are rising property taxes, unemployment, drug abuse, or simply a proliferation of potholes. The combination of resources and will that a community can draw upon to address these challenges is known as the community's capacity. When capacity is comparable to or exceeds the scale of the problems the community faces, then residents tend to have greater levels of satisfaction and lower levels of stress, and measures of their perceived quality of life go upward.

When community capacity is inadequate to address existing issues, the opposite is true; that is, people feel that problems are overwhelming, that nothing is being done to address them, and that their quality of life has declined. Once the latter trend takes hold, it can be difficult to reverse, because the community's general dissatisfaction tends to act as an obstacle to positive change. To prevent this, as well as to address it once it has begun, communities often strive to build their capacity, which is another way of saying they seek to identify their strengths and put them to good use (Johnson et al., 2016).

Many different definitions of community capacity building are used, each one differing slightly as it emphasizes those aspects that are uniquely relevant to its own origins. What is consistent across definitions is that in order to build community capacity, one must be in a position to combine a region's organizational resources, its social capital, and its human resources. Human resources are simply the people themselves, who must be willing to work together for the improvement of their community, and organizations are groups of individuals gathered together for a common purpose. Social capital is an intangible asset, and one more difficult to define. Essentially, to possess social capital within a group means that others listen to what one has to say and value one's opinion, and may even be persuaded by it. To have social capital in a community means that the community may follow one's lead (Schaffer, 2015).

Community capacity building has special relevance for the developing world, where communities have needs that are more pressing than those found in Western nations. The United Nations has many programs designed to help communities build their capacity by providing access to clean drinking water, medicines and doctors, as well as food and shelter where necessary. This type of community capacity building is meant to "jump start" additional development, by making other improvements possible.

For example, a community without access to clean drinking water might have a problem with children being unable to attend school due to illness caused by drinking contaminated water. If it is possible to build the community's capacity by providing reliable, permanent access to drinking water, this will improve the health of children, allowing them to attend school and their parents to work if necessary, rather than stay home to care for them. Because the children are able to continue their education, they will acquire new skills that they can later use to provide additional benefits to the community.

As this example demonstrates, a key feature of many forms of community capacity building is that the results of capacity building activities are not always easy to identify, and frequently occur over long periods of time. This has both positive and negative implications. The positive effects of the long-term benefits are that by making basic changes in a community's way of life, it is possible to provide benefits that make a huge difference, far into the future, with relatively few resources. The negative side to this is that because the benefits can be such a long time in coming, it can be difficult to convince people to provide assistance, since many people expect quick results and obvious improvements almost overnight (Gabay & Ilcan, 2017).

Further Insights

Community capacity building is frequently categorized into three different types of action, or three different levels at which the work can be conducted. These are societal, institutional, and individual. Community capacity building at the societal level is intended to address problems that occur within the structures of government and other social institutions. Many of these involve unequal distributions of power, and the appointment of officials who are unresponsive to the needs of their constituents, either willfully so or through incompetence.

An example could be found in a regional government made up largely of corrupt officials who, instead of serving the public to the best of their ability, focus primarily on keeping their jobs and protecting one another from criticism or attempts at reform. In such a situation, basic services are often unavailable unless one has the right personal connections, or unless one can afford to pay bribes to the right officials so the task can be accomplished. Building community capacity at this level requires large-scale organizing with the goal of exerting so much attention and public pressure on the structures of power that eventually they must make concessions if they want to avoid being rapidly, or even violently, replaced (An et al., 2017).

Community capacity building at the institutional level places the focus not on a broad sector of society, but on the institutions in a community that are struggling to offer services needed by that community. In this context, building capacity has sometimes been interpreted as needing to create new institutions and impose them on the community, but this is far from ideal. One reason is that it may be wasteful to create an entirely new institution—a school, a library, a hospital, for example—when one already exists but simply lacks adequate resources.

Another reason is that creating a new institution often involves an outside group forcing its vision onto the members of the community, which can create resentment that ultimately detracts from the project's effectiveness. It is far preferable for aid efforts to concentrate on working with a community's existing institutions, helping them to identify their needs and then connecting them with resources that can address those needs. Institutional capacity building may also focus on modernization projects, such as renovating classrooms in a school, or helping a hospital to acquire new equipment for use in treating patients (Despard, 2017).

Individual capacity building involves working directly with members of the community. This can take the form of providing assistance in the form of education and advocacy, but it may also require the use of persuasive skills to help community members see their own opportunities and understand the benefits of taking advantage of them. It is often the case that some individuals within a community may resist efforts at change or capacity building being undertaken by others in the community, either because they wish to avoid change or because they do not share the same vision of prosperity and advancement.

Working with various members of the community to help them develop a shared vision of growth is typical of capacity building at the individual level. Interestingly, capacity building sometimes flows naturally (or at least more easily) from societal to institutional to individuals. That is, the capacity building efforts at the societal level can result in additional changes that affect the institutional level, and these can in turn affect individuals (Bjerke & Renger, 2017).

For example, societal capacity building might result in political reform and the election of new officials to positions overseeing education. These individuals might then push for increased funding for schools, to allow them to hire more teachers, renovate old buildings, and purchase instructional materials such as textbooks (an institutional capacity building measure). The availability of these additional resources will have a direct, positive impact on members of the community, whose children will have a better experience in school and be more likely to succeed academically.

It has been argued that the majority of community capacity building efforts should be concentrated at the societal level precisely because of the potential for changes there to propagate to the institutional and individual levels. The problem with doing this is that capacity building at the societal level usually takes the longest and requires the greatest amount of resources and coordination, so results often take years to achieve. Many organizations therefore pursue capacity building across multiple levels simultaneously (Fukushima et al., 2017).

Issues

As occurs with almost any type of change, community capacity building has its critics, and it is certainly true that many capacity building efforts result in failure or sub-optimal outcomes. There are many reasons for this, but one issue that tends to draw a significant amount of attention is the temptation that capacity building groups have to apply the right solution to the wrong problem. This means that when trying to improve a situation, capacity builders tend to look for guidance from other organizations that have had to deal with similar situations, and then try to use the same strategies that succeeded in those cases. This may be referred to as consulting best practices, but in many cases it is an approach that does not produce the best outcomes. This is because solutions to issues involving capacity building are often highly context-dependent, meaning that they are problems that require solutions that are in many respects unique, since they are tied to the particular circumstances of interest. The term for this type of application of best practices is isomorphic mimicry.

The reason that isomorphic mimicry so often fails to accomplish the desired ends is that its primary utility is with issues that have a technical solution that responds to the same corrective measures regardless of context. As soon as issues arise involving personalities, cultural practices, or other subjective factors, isomorphic mimicry becomes much less effective. This has been demonstrated countless times, yet the temptation to look for a simple, pre-existing solution remains too great for many to resist (Mussari & Ruggiero, 2017).

Another criticism of community capacity building has to do with its underlying motives. One would assume that, owing to the very nature of capacity building, the motives of participants would be altruistic in virtually every conceivable scenario. After all, it is difficult to imagine a motive for helping people other than the act of providing aid. However, it has been argued that capacity building programs, particularly those backed by governments, are sometimes implemented, at least in part, as a means of pacifying a group that might otherwise begin to agitate for change. From this perspective, groups that are in power have an interest in remaining in power, and when community conditions become unbearable to live with, there is the possibility that the community may rise up and demand change across the board (Gil-Rivas & Kilmer, 2016).

Those in power, according to this view, may put in place programs that assist the community by building up its capacity, purely as a means of ensuring their own security. It is in fact likely that this does occur from time to time, but not frequently enough to make the cynical building of capacity anything other than the exception. In part this is due to the fact that people are not generally oblivious to ulterior motives that may be present in capacity building programs; indeed, some capacity building programs attempt to involve commercial businesses in a manner that could potentially be profitable for them, and this type of arrangement is generally not well-received, once people in the community become aware of it. Often when capacity building programs that are manipulative are implemented, the community may reject the assistance they offer, although in some cases this can be transformed into compromise. Understandably, the more a capacity building program appears to—or actually does—come from the outside, without engaging those who live in the community to assess needs, plan solutions, and generate ideas, the greater the likelihood that it may be perceived as merely an attempt at pacification or avoiding conflict (Faulk & Stewart, 2017).

When community capacity building efforts fail, it tends to be attributable to those involved neglecting one of three basic tenets of capacity building. The first of these is continuity. This means that capacity building is not something that happens overnight, or that can be accomplished in a few weeks just by spending some money; it requires time, effort, and consistent attention to build change slowly and to convince those in the community to embrace it. Second, capacity building should primarily be local, particularly in the choice of who it involves: committees should have most of their membership drawn from community members, information should be shared early and often with the community, and people in the community should be given choices and opportunities to be heard. Finally, it must be understood by all concerned that community capacity building is a significant commitment, and participants bear a great responsibility to make the best decisions they can for their community's future.

Terms & Concepts

Economic Resilience: A quality of communities that makes them able to withstand financial difficulties by reconfiguring themselves and adopting a new strategy. For example, a town that loses its major employer might provide job training to its citizens so they can learn new trades and avoid having to move away.

Isomorphic Mimicry: The practice of imitating a solution that worked elsewhere, often without taking into account the differences in context.

Needs Assessment: A process through which a person or group is studied to better understand what he or she is in need of. This could be anything from medical treatment to education to long-term employment.

Resource Mobilization: The process of identifying and acquiring tangible and intangible resources for use in a project. "Mobilization" usually refers to the assembly of the resources in a specific location or the deployment of the resources to the service delivery site.

Social Capital: A quality similar to credibility, which a person may possess with regard to another person or group. Having social capital means having the ability to influence or convince another.

Sustainability: The quality of a program that accomplishes its goal in a way that supports the continuation of its work. Community capacity building is more valuable if it incorporates principles of sustainability, because this makes it more likely that the program can continue over the long term.

Bibliography

An, X., Deng, H., Chao, L., & Bai, W. (2014). Knowledge management in supporting collaborative innovation community capacity building. Journal of Knowledge Management, 18(3), 574–590.

Bjerke, M. B., & Renger, R. (2017). Being smart about writing SMART objectives. Evaluation & Program Planning, 61, 125–127.

Despard, M. R. (2017). Can nonprofit capacity be measured? Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 46(3), 607–626.

Faulk, L., & Stewart, M. J. (2017). As you sow, so shall you reap? Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 27(3), 317–334.

Fukushima, Y., Ishimura, G., Komasinski, A. J., Omoto, R., & Managi, S. (2017). Education and capacity building with research: A possible case for Future Earth. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 18(2), 263–-276.

Gabay, C., & Ilcan, S. (2017). The affective politics of the sustainable development goals: Partnership, capacity-building, and big data. Globalizations, 14(3), 468–485.

Gil-Rivas, V., & Kilmer, R. P. (2016). Building community capacity and fostering disaster resilience. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 72(12), 1318–1332.

Johnson, H., Solarsh, B., Bloomberg, K., & West, D. (2016). Supporting people with complex communication needs through community capacity building: The Communication Access Network. Tizard Learning Disability Review, 21(3), 130–139.

Mussari, R., & Ruggiero, P. (2017). Merging for Capacity and a Capacity for Merging: Politicians, Citizens, and Discourses in Public Administrations. Financial Accountability & Management, 33(1), 27–47.

Schaffer, V. (2015). Social media: A conduit for increasing knowledge and skill for capacity building. E-Journal of Social & Behavioural Research in Business, 6(2), 20–33. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=117150458&site=ehost-live

Community Capacity Building

On this Page

Subject Terms

Community Capacity Building

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading