Fifty years of capacity building: Taking stock and moving research forward<sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper assesses the literature on “capacity building” through a systematic literature review. Taking concepts as the ontological building blocks of theories, we ask: what is known about the evolution of capacity building as a concept and what can that history tell us about its strengths and weaknesses? To this end, we dig into the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of capacity building. Through this Foucauldian “archaeological description”, we show that capacity building discourse has evolved dialectically, with each new concept emerging to address the failings of earlier concepts. The paper suggests the “new pragmatism” as a theoretical framework to guide a more rigorous and relevant theory and practice of capacity building especially for public administration. Rooted in sensitivity to context and methodological pluralism, the new pragmatism embraces complexity, delivers “best‐fit” rather than “best practice” solutions, and involves researchers and practitioners in decolonial knowledge co‐creation to tackle capacity building challenges.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.062 | 0.074 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".