Because we live in an imperfect world, the nuances of practice often diverge from our ideal notions of the way things ought to be done. This is particularly true in the international development field, where many acknowledge that capacity-building efforts sometimes fall far short of "best practices" and may even involve subtle forms of cultural domination; there is, however, broad agreement that under optimal conditions capacity building actively involves community members in the visualization and construction of their own future and produces enduring transformation.

Growing evidence points to a paradigmatic shift away from expert-driven approaches to development and toward approaches based upon active participation of local communities in creating their own futures (Brown 1993; Healey and Shaw 1993; Tacconi and Tisdell 1993). Even within narrower areas like project planning and implementation, increasing attention focuses upon reinforcing the pursuit of self-reliance by the community being served—inviting its citizens to participate actively in project planning and execution.

Such a perspective implies that any kind of "input" failing to involve recipients in active, self-directed processes of inquiry may foster in them either a dependence toward the education-providers or an outright rejection of the input as irrelevant. Many non-Western activists have become alarmed by the ways in which technocratically literate professionals, in their misplaced zeal for "helping" disenfranchised communities, actually erode communities’ self-esteem and their capacity to generate solutions internally consistent with their culturally determined philosophies of life (Galtun 1980; Friere 1972). Moreover, the solutions endorsed by such curricula are often exported out of context; the frequent absence of any deeper referents that would help anchor the input to the experience and history of the recipient group is a serious shortcoming that characterizes many approaches to capacity building (Adams 1979). The repudiation of the "capacity-building expert" paradigm is elegantly encapsulated in the 1995 Annual Report of the Community Development Resource Association (CDRA), based in South Africa:

The irony is that even though the limitations of expert-driven models of development have been recognized in the development literature for several decades, few models of development and participation emerged that were truly participatory. This article attempts to delineate some of the core conditions and processes associated with interventions that build local capacities while honoring the inherent strengths of local communities and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

What type of capacity-building interventions truly build local capacity? Based upon our work at the Global Excellence in Management (GEM) Initiative with nearly one hundred global social change organizations and our reading of the literature, we posit that such interventions share three characteristics:

• They engage participants in deep processes of inquiry that honor participants’ capacity for constructive self-determination.
• They seek to create learning contexts in which participants become "turned on" to their own strengths and collectively experience an enhancement of their capacities.
• They enable recipient communities to invent creative responses to situations by delving into their own history and experience.

The fifteen field projects reviewed in putting together this article were based directly upon or represented a variant of the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology.

In the domain of social change and international development, a variety of approaches are available for guiding interventions into social systems. A recently developed approach that has been gaining visibility among global social change organizations in particular is Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987). Although many explanations could account for the sudden popularity of the appreciative approach, in our view the fact that it offers social change and international development professionals a methodology which meets the aforementioned criteria and promotes the development of local capacities through "generative dialogue" certainly has added to its appeal. As an approach to organizational interventions, an appreciative inquiry aims to "discover and describe exceptional moments which give life to the system and activate members’ competencies and energies (Cooperrider and Srivastva 1987).

In other words, AI may be characterized as an inquiry into the life-giving properties of an organization. By asking the members of a community to recount peak moments ["Please tell me about a time when commitment to the community was at its highest. What was happening?], Appreciative Inquiry seeks to generate new knowledge. Such knowledge, anchored in the community’s history, can help it expand the realm of the possible, articulate a collectively designed future, and engage in a planning process to translate into reality the images of possibility embodied in the peak-moment stories. Put another way, the execution of the AI approach involves some combination of the following elements:

1. Delineation of peak moments through stories shared by community members.
2. Identification of themes underlying those peak moments.
3. Envisionment and articulation of new possibilities based upon the peak moments.
4. Embodiment of these possibilities in so-called "possibility propositions."
5. Engagement of the community in extensive "sense making" and in creating common script through collective dialogue designed to translate these images of possibility into actual reality.

The fifteen projects constituting the sample are part of the GEM Initiative, an enduring program in global social change initiated collaboratively by the Department of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through a grant awarded by the latter organization. Under the auspices of this joint agreement, one of the programs offered is a three-phase GEM Certificate Program in Global Change and Social Innovation. This paper examines fifteen field projects that participants of the 1996 Certificate Program undertook during the program’s second phase, with the intent of distilling learnings relevant to the theory and practice of community-level capacity building.

We selected only participants from the 1996 program because we wanted a sample of capacity-building projects that allowed an adequate time frame for longitudinal tracking. Although the methodology used in the fifteen projects is predicated on the AI approach, we would argue that the findings of our study also offer useful, and more general, insights into the processes underlying effective capacity-building interventions. The participants in the Certificate Program are middle or senior management executives in international NGOs and local U.S.-based private voluntary organizations (PVOs). Some of the capacity-building projects that participants undertook were organizationally based, while others were embedded within a larger community base.

All fifteen participants embarked upon intensive and challenging field projects designed to translate the conceptual learning and developmental experiences from the Certificate Program into practical applications. We have arbitrarily labeled these projects from 1 through 15, to facilitate easy cross-referencing throughout our discussion. (Table 1 presents a brief overview of each of the 15 projects.)

Based upon analysis of the processes involved in these capacity building projects, we identified five distinct themes. In this article, our mode of presentation will be to state each proposition and, because of space constraints, provide only one or two examples to illustrate a particular proposition. Capacity building that truly honors local capacities and indigenous wisdom demonstrates an identifiable configuration of characteristics and conditions that we seek to elucidate through the five propositions that follow.

The integration of the positive images of the past and the future emphasizes the shared, unifying aspects of a community’s experience; this inquiry process, involving reflection followed by imagination, paves the way for the collective articulation of super-ordinate goals that dissipate divisive tendencies while mobilizing efforts toward the joint enactment of a positively valued future.

A "consciousness of common purpose" results from collectively reflecting upon what community members value most about their shared experiences and a possible future. Diverse constituencies with competing or varied definitions of a situation engage in new conversations that reveal super-ordinate goals, often resolving what seemed previously like sharply antagonistic agendas. Several of the projects illustrated this shift toward a cooperative consciousness in which the similarities, rather than the differences, in the contrasting aspirations of different groups came to be emphasized.

Project 4, involving members of Russian civil society, enrolled students and senior citizens in a multigenerational conversation as a way to initiate a process of national reconstruction through a participatory envisioning process. Members of the Russian parliament, public officials, NGO leaders, journalists, artists, and young professionals were asked to outline what a new Russia would look like in which they would like to live and would be proud to have their children living in as well. Inspiring and moving excerpts emerged from people of all ages in response to this invitation, articulating the hopes, visions, and peak experiences that constitute the core inspiration of a people on the threshold of a new possibility. Artists created visual exhibits, languaging possibility through the medium of art.

The unifying consequences of engaging in future-oriented dialogue, while standing in positive intentions supported by the peak moments of the past, helps create a schema of apperception in which members begin to be more attracted to their similarities than repelled by their differences.

The process of collectively recounting peak moments in a community’s history generates an enlarged conception of a community’s capability, elevating the collective self-esteem of the community and stimulating it to reclaim a sense of agency and an internal locus of control.

Community members move from perceiving themselves merely as passive recipients of the consequences of an external agency’s or sector’s or specific other’s actions (the "external agency" being any set of institutional arrangements or circumstances outside community control), to reframing their identity as architects of their own destiny, proactive agents actively seeking to alter existing circumstances. The stance of consciously valuing and reaffirming the best of what has been appears to elevate the self-esteem and self-efficacy of community members both individually and collectively, thereby producing a mobilization of knowledge, skills, and competencies formerly lying latent under several layers of disempowering inner dialogue.

Project 2, in which an AI-based strategic-planning workshop was presented to eleven NGOs in Ghana, illustrates this shift in the locus of responsibility. The precipitating factor for the organization of the workshop was the imminent withdrawal of NGO funding by the Ghana Social Marketing Foundation. With its focus on unleashing possibility, the AI process was deemed an appropriate approach for empowering people even in the face of this funding setback. As the NGO leaders began to examine peak moments in their organizational histories, identifying what had been the central life-giving forces in their organizations, they moved beyond their perception of their organizations as "victims" of a withdrawal in funding and began to see them instead as powerful entities that have operated at very high levels of effectiveness in the past.

The process brought about renewed commitment to the "community-based distribution" of family planning commodities programs, as the participating NGOs began to recognize the program’s intrinsic worth and the importance of strengthening it by themselves even in the face of withdrawal of external funding. The energy and enthusiasm generated by the AI process was palpable, and participants welcomed the introduction of an inspiring, possibility-based approach to strategic planning—one fundamentally different from the traditional problem-centered approach they were used to.

The eleven NGOs thereafter formulated three possibility propositions (strategic agendas), together with an action plan for translating their positive images into operational reality in the back-home context. In terms of capacity building, the exercise breathed a new life into the NGOs by creating an important shift: no longer would they be passive recipients of funding from the GSMF but instead active architects capable of delivering the program effectively by giving up entrenched notions of dependence on GSMF and competition with each other. The shift in the locus of responsibility, from an external to an internal locus of control, produced a sense of ownership of the situation.

The effect here can be likened to popular African folklore: in the "acres of diamonds" story, the central character—an African farmer obsessed with finding a diamond mine—travels all over the continent after selling his farm. His efforts bear no fruit and finally, in his frustration, the farmer throws himself into a well. His associates discover later that the man’s former farm was itself a diamond mine, a detail the farmer missed entirely since he did not recognize diamonds in their uncut form. The story helps illustrate the human propensity to unwittingly undervalue or ignore available resources and instead to wander far away, both physically and psychically, in search of fresh fields and greener pastures. Organizations and communities frequently find themselves in situations wherein the expertise needed to solve a problem or open up a fresh opportunity exists within the community but is never invoked or consulted

In Project 6, involving an NGO in the Himalayan region, the members of the Sikkimese communities told stories illustrating what they liked about their communities and what they would like their villages to look like in ten years. This process led directly to the identification of local resources for community action. In another phase of the same project, involving the Himalayan environment and literacy promotion, the community’s participation in an Appreciative Inquiry exercise resulted in an inventory of members’ skills and expertise.

PVO-Government relations in Nepal were the focus of Project 7, in which members of the government delegation and PVO representatives shared stories about what they most valued about each other and what their partnership could look like in ten years. This dialogue opened up the opportunity for harnessing collaborative potential between two major organizations that formerly operated in splendid isolation. Such creation of new relationships at the local level is another example of the discovery and mobilization of local resources that can follow from the appreciative valuing of potentially proximate entities whose collaboration represents a powerful, though latent possibility. The partnership has already helped create a Makalu-Barun Conservation project and has helped to strengthen government capacity to plan, implement, and monitor activities through local communities and local NGOs.

Uniformly, all the projects studied illustrated the translation of a seemingly "problematic" antecedent condition into an affirmatively stated future objective. A few examples serve to make the point more powerfully.

The antecedent condition present in Project 2, involving the eleven NGOs in Ghana, was a withdrawal of GSMF funding. The project objectives were redefined in terms of strengthening the capacity of NGOs in their collective implementation of reproductive health programs. In the case of Project 3, the antecedent condition was a deficiency in the academic curriculum of mainstream schools. The project objectives were reformulated in terms of developing a long-term educational mission for the Bronx community and to create a high-quality educational institution. Similarly, in Project 5, the antecedent condition was the divisive forces that have kept the community historically fragmented, while the project’s objectives were framed in terms of building linkages and partnerships among people, organizations, and communities in the county.

In virtually all the projects, it was evident that the antecedent conditions were anchored in a paradigm of deficiency and that the process of capacity building needed to include the formulation of future objectives in affirmative terms, within a paradigm of abundance and new possibility.

The notion of centrifugal and centripetal patterns is, we believe, a useful distinction in understanding the dynamics of community capacity building. Centrifugal patterns are demonstrated when an intervention fosters inclusion; introduced by an individual or small coterie, the process rapidly expands, inviting and engaging more and more people in a pattern of inquiry and dialogue—a characteristic evident in almost all the projects.

In Project 1, the AI protocol helped launch an initial set of interviews but was expeditiously disseminated among a much larger body of people as members of the organization participated in and subsequently conducted "listening tours" involving board members, staff, and partner organizations. In Project 3, the people overseeing the process launched the interviews, but the process quickly turned into an inquiry-based dialogue creating an evolving image of a high-quality educational institution involving broader cross-sections of youth, parents, and local officials. Similarly, in Project 4, the oral and written interviews initially involved a small group but then expanded to include larger populations of artists, school children, and senior citizens in a collective process of inquiry and dialogue about the new, positive images of the future of the Russian nation.

Project 9, which addressed the planning and implementation of a safe-water project in a Tanzanian village community, started with a week-long workshop among a select group of participants and then snowballed into a comprehensive follow-up inquiry and conversational processes between the participants and the rest of the village community. This process spanned outward to include current village leaders, NGO representatives, and government officials who were invited to engage with and contribute to the collective inquiry and dialogue.

Capacity building that truly honors local capabilities and indigenous wisdom demonstrates an identifiable configuration of characteristics and conditions; such enterprises—

• Generate cooperative consciousness by leading the community to reflect upon what it deeply values about the past, followed by a speculation about a desirable, positively valued future.
• Cause a fundamental shift of responsibility in the direction of the local entity by elevating the collective self-esteem of the community.
• Draw a community’s attention back to its own resources.
• Induce the community to reframe the antecedent condition in affirmative terms, viewing circumstances as possibilities calling to be realized rather than as problems to be solved.
• Set in motion a centrifugal pattern of conversations that engage an ever-widening collection of people in expanding circles of inquiry and dialogue around possibility.

In studying capacity building, we need to turn more toward research methodologies that respondents themselves invent rather than toward research methodologies that are ratified by Western canons of "good" scientific research and may be perceived as an insidious, hegemonic infiltration by the "experts" seeking to build and evaluate the capacity of less-privileged novices. Even as we set about interviewing our sample to collect additional information on the projects completed, we were awakened to the limitations of our methodological frames and our interview protocols.

The following example illustrates the extent to which the two worlds—namely that of the Western-educated social scientist and that of the Indigenous development professional—are disconnected. We were questioning a project champion from Africa about the capacity-building experience one of his communities was undertaking. During the conversation, as we were trying to evaluate the intervention according to several sets of longitudinal sustainability criteria derived from scholarly articles, we found to our dismay that the project was susceptible to technical weaknesses on many counts. Our interviewee did not respond by engaging in a rigorous defense of his community’s project strategy. Rather, he told us a simple African story that sought to access deeper social wisdom.

The story concerns a man, his son, and a donkey journeying through a series of African villages. The trio walks through the first village with the son riding the donkey and the father walking by their side; soon the villagers flock from their huts, exclaiming indignantly at the son’s unfairness in riding the donkey while his father walks.

Wanting to protect his son from the barrage of criticism, the father sits on the donkey and makes his son walk by their side. As they approach the next village, the villagers condemn the father for riding while his poor son has to walk all this distance. Aghast, the father and son decide to both walk with the donkey, instead of riding. At the next village, they are greeted by a mocking group which marvels at the pair’s foolishness in not riding the donkey, which is meant to be a beast of burden.

Disappointed, the father and son decide they will both ride the donkey so that neither of them is ridiculed. They approach the next village, where they are met by a group that cries out in dismay at the cruelty of two human beings riding a poor donkey. Finally, the father and son decide to carry the donkey on their heads, instead of riding it, only to encounter another group of people who burst into hysterical laughter at the sight of two human beings carrying a donkey on their heads!

The moral of the story, as our interviewer stressed, lies in the importance of taking action despite the countless sources of criticism inevitably encountered from this or that evaluative perspective. The story of powerful international development work is one in which the "experts" are likely to find the technical flaws one way or another, and yet committed action is key to sustaining life and alleviating human suffering. The stories and parables that provide inspiration for committed action come from indigenous cultures that perhaps do not have the luxury of endless scholarly debate.

Another implication of our study has led us to question what matters most in capacity building. It appears to us that a large number of Western NGOs that are seeking to build the capacity of their counterparts in the "developing" world operate with technocratic models that delineate the domains of capacity building in terms of such components as financial, technical, and human resource capacities. This study appears to suggest that more important than the technology of capacity building are a plethora of conversational processes at the individual, organizational, and community level devoted to mutual affirmation, a valuing of shared history, positive imagery, and a sense of pride in the constantly unfolding future of the focal community. The orientation of most Western NGOs toward measurement, control, and "techniques" predisposes them more toward the procedural, technique-based dimensions of capacity building than to the interactive, relational, ontological aspects that create a powerful social and psychological context for capacity building.

The future of research on what builds capacity in pluralistic settings will be supported by the development of a research paradigm that is truly home grown in the communities themselves rather than transplanted mechanically from a sourcing point in a Western academic monolith. Even within the domain of international development, we fail to realize the extent to which elitist definitions of actors and situations permeate our thinking. Many of us engaged in capacity-building work loosely use such phrases as "the poor" and "the poorest of the poor" to refer to certain disenfranchised communities that are candidates for developmental assistance. How often do we stop to remind ourselves that to look upon these communities as "poor," instead of noticing the multiplicity of ways in which they may be endowed, is the ultimate signal that we have surrendered to elitist ideology? The dominant economic description of a community as poor blinds us irrevocably to the sources of abundance that reside within the community.

As an observer once noted, individuals who live in the so-called devastated communities of the world probably generate and expend more courage and cooperation in a single day than most of us in more-affluent conditions do in an entire lifetime. And yet we think of these individuals and communities as lacking!

The notion of capacity building is a construct that has lost its utility unless we speak of mutual capacity building and truly engage, in a spirit of mutual discovery, with the communities we seek to serve; under such conditions of mutuality, the question of who is building whose capacity is redundant for the spirit of mutual learning so authentically permeates the relationship. Appreciative Inquiry appears to be one methodology that advances the paradigmatic shift previously alluded to, by focusing our attention upon the sources of abundance that inspire a community rather than upon the sources of scarcity that bedevil it.