Developing Capacities and Agency in Complex Times

Abstract

Community capacity building has joined the many other ambiguous, and contested concepts associated with the field of social development producing what Kenny (2002) described as a ‘melded’ or ‘fused’ discourse that can act as a Trojan horse for neo-liberal ideas within community development.1 Capacity building with its focus on what McKnight described as building from the inside out puts emphasis on consensus building, sustaining multiple and diverse networks and relationships, identifying and celebrating community strengths and assets, generating broad-based community involvement toward mutual gain, developing whole community visions for the future and identifying steps that can be taken to make such visions real. As Craig (2007) has argued, the almost global fixation with capacity building is a recent phenomenon, dating from the early 1990s, but one that has swept across the various policy, practitioner and academic communities and generated a growing literature largely espousing its benefits with some notable dissenting voices notwithstanding (Mowbray, 2005; Powell and Geoghegan, 2006; DeFilippis et al., 2009). This has been paralleled by a set of handbooks and guides to the practice and a growing number of welfare professionals encouraged to embrace capacity building as part of their remit but often with little or no training and education in community development (Hoggett et al., 2009).