Rethinking capacity building

Development organisations in the global North consistently grapple with how they can decolonise the way they work and better integrate gender and intersectionality perspectives into their programmes. 

IIED has been taking strides to bring these perspectives into our work, and we are now also using gender, intersectionality and decoloniality lenses to examine the concept and approach behind capacity building. Traditional capacity building approaches have global Northern biases, often undervaluing local knowledge and treating learning as a one-off transaction. Learning from grassroots social movements can help deconstruct these biases and rethink approaches to capacity building.

IIED is working with the Liyang network, an environmental organisation with a membership primarily comprised of Indigenous and queer grassroots representatives based in the Philippines, to understand and document different ways of learning and doing capacity building.