50 - Mutual Capacity Strengthening and Transition Thinking to Shift Power to Proximate Actors

Abstract Information: Shifting power to those working within their communities at the national or sub-national level involves amplifying their capacity to lead and have ownership of projects ranging across the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding fields. The Stopping As Success (SAS+) consortium – made up of CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, Peace Direct, and Search for Common Ground, and funded by USAID – has been learning about and supporting processes that transition activities, projects, and organizations from international leadership and management to locally led development since 2017. Most recently, we have accompanied partners through these processes, as well as piloting and refining our resources to support transitions to local leadership. A key insight that has emerged from this for projects and initiatives that aim to shift power to local or proximate actors is to consider mutual capacity strengthening and transition thinking at the early design stages.

Mutual capacity strengthening refers to a process of strengthening skills, knowledge, and network contacts in which all actors participate as equal partners. This is in contrast to one-way capacity strengthening, often carried out through pre-designed training packages that don’t consider local contexts, needs, and existing strengths and capacities. Transition thinking encompasses mutual capacity strengthening, as well as other ways that partners work together to give greater voice and power to local actors, including financial sustainability, communication and decision-making practices, and more.

This workshop will provide a hands-on opportunity to learn about mutual capacity strengthening and transition thinking, creating space for participants to apply these concepts and reflect on their own work. Participants will be provided prompts created by the session facilitator, which will include an example scenario for them to reflect on, guiding questions, and SAS+ mutual capacity strengthening guidance updated this year. They will be asked to reflect on their own capacities (strengths and potential needs), and then use the example scenarios to identify where and how mutual capacity strengthening could benefit partners, as well as how they could be involved if they were a partner. Participants will be in groups for this discussion, and if there are multiple participants from the same organization or project, then they will be given the option to reflect on their own work using the guiding questions and SAS+ guidance provided.

Participants can expect to gain or sharpen the following skills through this workshop: 1) awareness of processes (mutual capacity strengthening and transition thinking) that support and amplify local actors into greater leadership or ownership of an activity, project, or organization; 2) a more holistic and nuanced understanding of capacity strengthening and how it can both replicate imbalance power dynamics, or serve to challenge them; and 3) an understanding of how to take the concepts of mutual capacity strengthening and transition thinking and put them into practice.