Developing capacity assessment tool for land policy implementation: Experience from Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda.

The common usage of the concept “capacity building” gives the impression that one is “building” capacity from scratch and that external expertise is used to create a skill, knowledge, competence infrastructure or facility that did not exist before. This creates a perception of superimposing
external/foreign approaches as opposed to local practices, thereby also jeopardizing ownership and sustainability. This paper introduces a new concept of “capacity development” which pre-supposes and emphasizes that inherent capacity and organic development processes already exists in all countries, communities and contexts. It focuses on the need to support, facilitate, complement and further develop processes already underway. The challenge is identifying precisely, the prevailing capacity gaps without losing the essence of inclusive land policy engagement. This paper details the development of a new assessment tool for capacity for land policy implementation, which was validated practitioners and stakeholders in Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda. The tool addresses the problems which contemporary capacity assessment methodologies have by a 4 step process. As the capacity assessment relies on the notion that capacity development is intangible and dynamic, it needs to be both sequential and cyclic. Still, the methodology needs testing in concrete cases of execution.