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This IdeasLAB blog is part of a series leading up to the launch of a publication on the theme of “renewing the social contract for education.” The theme of the series is based on the call from the report . See , and look for the full special issue in to be released in early 2024. 

By Ashley Emmerton & Jose Roberto Guevara

In development and education discourses, “capacity building” is often thought of as a process or approach to improving education practices, systems and structures. Recognising capacity building as education in its own right, however, primes it for both due scrutiny and renewed optimism. In forging a new social contract for education founded on an ethic of care, reciprocity and solidarity, the significant transformative potential of capacity building as education must not be overlooked.

If a new social contract for education is to “repair injustices while transforming the future,” we need at our disposal the perspectives and the tools to make these reparations and transformations a reality. Viewing capacity building as transformative education has the potential to reinvigorate the revolutionary roots of the concept and practice of capacity building, breathing new life into ways in which we share knowledge and strive together for shared futures through learning

The roots of capacity building in educational theory and practice are both liberatory and transformative, philosophically grounded in ,  and Freirean solidarity. In the early 1990s, capacity building aimed to create a platform for the marginalized to articulate their own visions of development, and contest top-down interventions in favour of 

However, today development practitioners, educators and organizational leaders find ourselves faced with the tendency for capacity building that equips organizations and staff with predominantly Western skills and knowledge to be prescribed, diminishing the value of multiple ways of being, doing, knowing. This tendency risks making development initiatives contingent not on need or justice, but on conformity to increasingly globalised ‘universal’ standards. 

Calls to “” approaches speak to how both the term and concept risk becoming enmeshed with imperialist and deficit narratives of ‘building’ up those who fail to deliver on technocratic targets. These calls prompt an opportunity for critical interrogation.  For example, what and whose knowledge and skills do we utilize, , towards what end, and ? A lens of reciprocal transformation, at both individual and organizational levels, rather than knowledge transference offers an entry point. 

Can the transformative nature of capacity building be reclaimed as an educational practice that contributes to enacting justice and solidarity?

Our proposals for embracing capacity building as education may provide an entry point to moving beyond the hurdles of narrowly defined and externally imposed training, to amplify the knowledge, practices and beliefs of those on the margins. Framed as a mutual endeavour, capacity building becomes not a question of ‘who builds whose capacity?’ but instead: How can capacity-building spaces and practices become truly transformative? How can capacity building become a process and practice of solidarity and mutual sharing? How can we harness capacity building as education to question and challenge the status quo?

So, what can transformative capacity building as education look like? 

At the individual level, as researchers and practitioners, our experiences using capacity building approaches, in with health practitioners (as shown in the image above) and (ToT) with non-formal educators in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) have highlighted the value of recognizing the multi-directional and mutual learning opportunities. For example, shifting the powered binary of Lao participant and international ‘capacity builder’ towards mutual partnership creates space to recognize that neither party comes to a capacity building exchange from a point of neutrality, nor as an empty vessel. All arrive to capacity building activities with our own contextually formed knowledge and assumptions around which knowledge is ‘best’. 

To use our experience to illustrate, a crucial step for the Lao participant who joins Training of Trainers workshops may be to recognize the depth and value of their own knowledge of the community, ontology, place, and pedagogy; a reciprocal step for the international trainer may be to recognize that their ‘best practice’ may have been positioned as ‘best’ within their own contextual reality and through a powered global hierarchy of knowledge. Crucial to this approach to capacity building practice is mutually strengthening capacities for critical reflexivity, both those of participants, as well as our own as researchers, practitioners and educators, to recognize and critically reflect on our respective accustomed ways of learning, doing and knowing. In this way, we may together shift the potentialities of capacity building – currently focused on the transference of skills and knowledge - towards liberatory aims of strengthening capacities to critically consider which skills and knowledge sharing serves people and on whose terms, and to accept, adapt, or reject this sharing in a climate of mutual respect and solidarity.   

At the organizational level, experiences have also highlighted the need for participants, practitioners and organizational leaders to advocate for a transformational approach to capacity building as part of broader organizational strategies to shift from notions of ‘service delivery’ towards a focus on agency and rights. Such need extends to understandings of capacity building beyond individual and team development, and towards developing the broader structural capacity of systems, institutions and programs to enable this recognition of difference and diverse knowledges and practices. 

For example, local health practitioners transitioning into leadership need organizational systems which not only provide platforms for their voices, but structurally enable decision making and action. Importantly, this work includes creating spaces and structures for people and organizations to adopt, co-construct and redefine knowledge and practices that serve their organizational aims and ethos, as well as to refuse and resist those that don't.

Therefore, rather than “cancel” capacity building, it is important for us, as educators, to leverage the potential of capacity building to create spaces of transformative, mutual knowledge-sharing for solidarity, justice and shared futures under a new social contract for education.