New approaches to urban water management need to be learnt by the people who have to implement them.

An excellent vehicle for learning is working on actual projects. They can be run as capacity building exercises.

The basic model is:

1. Find an area where people in your organisation need to learn a new way of doing things.
2. Develop a project in this area that is innovative for your organisation.
3. Run the project so that, by participating in decision-making, many staff learn how to work differently . Do this by:
   • Having workshops at key decision points in the life of the project that many staff participate in.
   • Involving experts in these workshops to offer guidance, answers questions, and improve project quality.
   • Facilitating workshops so that issues are well-discussed, people's concerns are listened to, and thinking about the decsions is very carefully tested.

Whenever your organisation needs to learn to work in a new way - and the learning curve is somewhat steep, at least for some parts of your organisation.

 

A capacity building gestalt:

• recognising that
  • to get people to do new things they need learning opportunities;
  • learning by doing is a great way to learn: one learns 'stuff' that could not be learnt other ways: one gets a feel for how to do things, instead of simply learning 'about' them;
    
• recognising that, in an organisational setting,
• actual projects are a great vehicle for learning by doing: people learn by doing something new;
• doing something new together builds informal networks - and these are a rich compliment to individual learning and formal networks;
  
• recognising various ways in which an actual project can become a rich capacity building process, including:
  
  • making decsion-making on the project a group process: including many people in decisions by making a workshop the forum in which they are made, provides both:
    1. wider organisational learning, and
    2. richer input into decisions (which is particularly appropriate when the project is, as it is in these cases, an innovative one for the organisation: risks are higher than usual, and they can be reduced by involving more people);
       
  • involving experts in the workshops so new perspectives and insights are brought to bear - and can be tested by members of your organisation; by having experts involved, the opportunity to really explore a different way of doing things is far greater;
    
  • having skilled facilitation ... if you think the capacity building process will suffer if managed normally by an appropriate manager or available expert ... this is a judgment call, and not necessarily an easy one to make; things to consider include:
  1. an in-house person may be good: the task is like chairing a meeting; however for the learning to go well one needs a chair who listens a lot and supports issues being explored, as opposed to a chair who leads by giving direction and making up the organisation's mind for it (a classical 'strong leader' would thus be a poor choice for this kind of process);
  2. generally speaking the experts won't be the best facilitators: its likely that they won't have good facilitation skills, and also that their attention will be focused on getting an innovative approach embraced, rather than on finding how this organisation can shift;
  3. an effective expert facilitator will need strong facilitation skills and a reasonable understanding of the problem domain (of course they don't need to be experts in the specific issues; on the other hand they should be skillful at developing syntheses and negotiating principled agreements on what should occur;
     
• leveraging actual projects is by far the best way to build organisational capacity, because the organisation learns by doing; to make this your modus operandi you have to work with where your organisation is actually at - work on the edge of what it can currently come to do; that is a helpful focus.

 

Because organisations learn by doing. When an organisation learns by doing,

1. not only do the individuals learn by doing,
2. a new way of working is legitimised (at least in so far as the project is successful), and
3. informal networks amongst people interested in the new way of working are extended and strengthened.

 

 

Capacity building in local government

Capacity building and change management in water sensitive urban design at Wyong Council (NSW)

Communities, Catchments and Councils: building capacity for sustainable change (paper, NSW)

A guide to intregrated local area planning (ILAP) (large pdf)
From the Australian Local Government Association.
Includes a lengthy discussion of capacity building in Councils.

Learning by doing: approaches

Adaptive management

Introduction to our Action Learning Approach (UK)
"When pit managers had problems, he encouraged them to meet together in small groups, on site, and ask one another questions about what they saw in order to find their own solutions, rather than bring in "experts" to solve their problems for them. The technique proved so successful that the managers wrote their own handbook on how to run a coal mine."

Tools to assist learning by doing (research article)

Toolkits

Multi-dimensional toolkits

These toolkits cover a far wider scope than the 'learning by doing' practices that are the focus of this page.

Cap-net: Capacity Building for Integrated Water Resources Management (UNDP) (requires Internet Explorer)

Capacity.org
Directory to resources on capacity building, including back copies of Capacity.org's newsletter.

Capacity development (Canada)

Institutional development: learning by doing and sharing (extensive review of tools)

Online training in watershed management (US EPA)
A superb online training resource in catchment management as a multidisciplinary activity.

Background

Understanding and promoting adoption of conservation technologies by rural landholders (Australia)
This paper has a focus on adoption of conservation technologies by farmers, however there are resonances with the adoption of new environmental management approaches in other organisations.