GPIA Professor Dr. McCandless has a new publication out, co-authored with Frauke de Weijer, that examines key lessons from the last two decades of research and practice on capacity development and applies them to the emerging resilience agenda. Resilience is associated with the capacity of individuals, groups and society as a whole to cope, adapt, and transform in the face of man-made and natural shocks. Resilience has long been used in the areas of food security, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. More recently, it has found its place in the areas of peacebuilding and statebuilding, to capture the essence of what is believed needed to build upon the endogenous strengths that exist locally and nationally, to buttress against shocks and stresses, and to lift people more permanently out of fragility and violent conflict. The concept of resilience is already impacting policy at the highest levels.
This chapter, in a web-based book from Capacity.org on Capacity Development: Beyond Aid, aims to capture and build on key lessons from the last two decades of research and practice in the field of capacity development. It suggests how to apply these lessons in the emerging resilience agenda. It argues that the resilience agenda may be off to a head start because of its own analytical underpinnings that embrace important aspects of where the field of capacity development has arrived to after several decades of reflection and practice.
The publication can be downloaded for free.
