Building capacities for transformative climate action: lessons from five fields of practice

Capacity building approaches have a deep history of mobilizing agency and enabling change across development, governance, and environmental contexts. It has also been recognized as a central means of implementation for supporting climate action in the Paris Agreement. Despite this, capacity building remains ambiguous, fragmented, and prone to cooption by vested interests, all of which can limit its effectiveness for transformative climate action. Given that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demonstrates the need for transformative climate action to reduce emissions and limit warming to 1.5°C, the experiences and practical insights from capacity building implementation can be leveraged to concretize the more theoretical literature on transformation. The purpose of this study is thus to synthesize the best practices and lessons learned from scholarship on capacity building implementation for enabling transformations in the context of climate change. This scholarship is synthesized from five fields that are known for their practitioner involvement and implementation focus, and where capacity building has been in wide use for several decades: international development, public health, community development, sustainability, and climate change. Four implications emerge as essential from the synthesis: the importance of enabling agency while navigating power dynamics between capacity building stakeholders; making space for local cultures and knowledge across every stage of capacity building; incorporating mechanisms for learning, collaboration and systems thinking; and going beyond technical, managerial, and technological framings to also build capacities for envisioning, creating, mobilizing, learning and inculcating desirable attitudes, behaviors and values.