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Change facilitation
By its very definition, capacity development implies facilitating or leading an entity to improved performance. This often entails helping different actors within an organization or across organizations to change and/or improve their interactions in order to bring about the desired changes.
Change facilitators do not only help to bring about the desired outcomes, they actively intervene in the capacity development process itself. The aim in doing this is to help the actors involved to engage, act and reflect on both the immediate challenge faced and the wider capacity development context. As the resources provided on this page show, the issues faced will vary considerably, depending on whether one is dealing with a single organization or network, or a broader multi-stakeholder process. Effective change facilitation requires a good understanding of, among others:
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Different advisory roles and the related behavioural requirements for change facilitators;
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Some of the underlying concepts and frameworks in change processes as well as a range of dialogue tools, methods and approaches used (for example action learning, social-organisational learning and knowledge networking);
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Specific approaches and tools for dealing with contesting values, politics, power, negotiation, conflict resolution and transformation, and mediation.
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Applications of these frameworks and approaches to specific change facilitation challenges, for instance multi stakeholder processes, social and public acccountability, and ‘value chain’ development
Several of the other topics featured on this website address aspects of these themes in more detail.
Featured Article
Learning to evaluate capacity development: The making of 'Facilitating resourcefulness'
This article is a supplement to Issue 43 of
Capacity.org. It takes a look behind the scenes of an extensive evaluation of 26 case
studies covering the support to capacity development of seven Dutch Development Partners under the
coordination and partial responsibility of the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of
the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign affairs. The evaluation aimed to draw lessons on how to improve
the effectiveness of future capacity development interventions.
- Search Terms:
- analytical frameworks
- casestudies
Recent Articles
Brazil launches online multistakeholder dialogues for Rio+20
25 April 2012
The Government of Brazil, as host of the June 2012 UN
Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20), has opened nine online thematic
"Sustainable Development Dialogues" to generate ideas and set the stage for the civil society
discussions to be held in Rio de Janeiro from 16-19 June 2012, immediately preceding UNCSD. The
Dialogues are grouped under the following themes: oceans; food and nutritional security;
sustainable development for fighting poverty; sustainable development as an answer to the economic
and financial crises; sustainable energy for all; water; the economics of sustainable development;
sustainable cities and innovation; and unemployment, decent work and migration.
Women Leading Change: Experiences promoting women's empowerment, leadership, and gender justice
13 April 2012
Published in March 2012, this publication features, four case studies describing experiences
from Cambodia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia in promoting women's political and economic
empowerment and leadership. The case studies describe the context in which women live, what
leadership means and how to achieve it. Attention is given to working within existing institutions
and cultural norms, and also to creating new institutions. The final section summarizes common
lessons and considerations for future policy and practice aiming to promote women's empowerment and
leadership.
Moving beyond strategy to implementation: Africa Capacity Indicators Report (ACIR) 2012
13 April 2012
The African Capacity Building
Foundation (ACBF) launched the second of its flagship annual reviews on the state of capacity
development in Africa on 3rd April. This year's report is devoted to the theme of capacity
development in agricultural transformation and food security. One of the highlights is Ghana's
upgrading to the 'High' category of the ACI composite index. The composite index measures the
policy environment, processes for implementation, development results at country level and capacity
development outcomes. In 2011 there were no countries classified under the 'High' category.
LenCD case stories database
24 March 2012
Case stories are an important and accessible way of
sharing experiences and learning lessons. Many organisations publish case stories on their
websites, but finding these stories has always required a good deal of research.
LenCD (Learning Network on Capacity Development), has been building up an index of case stories including material from the United Nations Development Programme, the Task Team on South–South Cooperation, SNV, the World Bank Institute, ECDPM, and other sources.
More than 500 case stories have now been catalogued and are searchable by country and by keyword on www.lencd.org/case-stories.
MoreFeature: Making markets work for smallholders?
23 March 2012
Capacity and agency
The polarised debate on how markets can work for or
against the interests of small-scale farmers, presents major challenges for practitioners. This
article aims to rebalance our thinking about smallholders and markets.
Capacity, complexity and consulting: lessons from managing capacity development projects
20 March 2012
In recent years, the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme of the UK-based
Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has increasingly focused on managing large, multiyear
processes, aimed at building the capacity of local institutions in developing countries to change
the way they engage with policy. This paper draws on the observations of RAPID staff involved
in various projects as well as on primary documentation such as trip reports, after action reviews
and project reports. It also includes a ‘ light-touch’ review of some of the grey and academic
literature available on capacity development, complexity, managing social change and aid agency
behaviour.
Other Topics
Essential Readings
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Facilitating multi-actor change
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M. Hemmati (2002) Multi-stakeholder Processes for Governance and Sustainability: Beyond Deadlock and Conflict, Earthscan
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Pruitt, B. and P. Thomas (2007) Democratic Dialogue – A Handbook for Practitioners, CIDA, IDEA, OAS and UNDP
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Wageningen International (2009) Building your Capacity to Facilitate Multi-Stakeholder Processes and Social Learning
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Divine Thaw and Warren Banks (2007) Facilitating Development Processes: Working in the Unknown, Olive-PPT, Durban
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De Caluwe, L. and H. Vermaak (2003) Learning to change: A guide for organizational change agents, Sage, Thousand Oaks, California
Featured Community
The Change Alliance: Using stakeholder processes and complexity thinking in governing for sustainability and social justice
The Change Alliance is an emerging
global network of organizations joining forces to increase the effectiveness of the
multi-stakeholder processes in which they engage. Its aim is to help improve the quality of
the design, dialogue, learning, and facilitation, on which these processes depend. The logic of the
Alliance is that complex problems demand a new dynamic of how governments, citizens, business and
civil society organizations work together. The Alliance facilitates a NING online learning
platform with interesting discussions, a Q&A section, blogs and announcements from
members.
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