Killing Two Birds With One Stone? A New Pragmatist Perspective on the Rigor-Relevance Gap in the Literature on Capacity Building Projects

Abstract

Despite scholarly and professional efforts, most capacity building projects fall short. The normative agenda, an effort to structure the concept and its practical applications, failed to produce rigorous thinking. A rigor-relevance gap seems to prevail. This article examines capacity building in the academic literature using criteria of scientific rigor and practical relevance. We asked: Why has the normative agenda failed to produce rigorous capacity building thinking? What can be done to improve the normative agenda for successful outcomes in the field? We analyzed 72 peer-reviewed articles through content analysis. We found that 71% of these articles are relevant to practice. However, while 52.5% involve case-studies, 94.5% of the articles lack rigor, as they are not explicit about or provide no methodology. We thus advocate for a scholarly literature based on the new pragmatism as an epistemological framework to bridge the rigor-relevance gap by promoting contextual sensitivity and methodological pluralism in research.