Capacity Building for Sustainable Development

Perspectives from research

Overview

Sustainability science is moving beyond just explaining how nature and society interact. The focus has shifted to building the skills and strategies needed to change these interactions to support sustainable development goals.

Key Findings 

Scholars have focused on capacities in six key areas needed for sustainability: 

• Capacity to promote equity both within and among generations
• Capacity to measure progress toward sustainable development
• Capacity to adapt development pathways to protect human well-being in the face of shocks
• Capacity to transform unsustainable development pathways onto sustainable ones
• Capacity to govern cooperatively to build and maintain collaborative relationships in pursuit of sustainability
• Capacity to link knowledge with action in pursuit of sustainability

Each capacity is necessary for the pursuit of sustainability, but they are also interdependent. Even well-developed capacities in one area — measurement, for example — can fall short when unsupported by capacities in others, such as governance or equity. Strategic integration across all six remains rare.

Research on capacity building for sustainability remains unevenly distributed across regions, sectors, and capacities. The interactions among capacities — how strength or weakness in one shapes prospects for others — are particularly understudied. This initiative aims to strengthen both research and practice across all six capacities.

Perspectives from practice

Overview

Development practitioners have been building, testing, and improving the skills needed for sustainability. This program aims to identify and organize best practices from their extensive experience. By comparing insights from both scholars and practitioners, we work to strengthen capacity building for sustainable development.
 

Key findings

• Society has already developed important skills needed for pursuing sustainability. 
• We can gain more from this practical experience by organizing and comparing lessons across different places and sectors.
• Even when strong skills are developed for key tasks like measurement or adaptation, they often fall short due to lack of support from other necessary skills. Strategic integration of all relevant skills is uncommon.
• Practitioners could benefit from more consistent use of lessons emerging from scholarly work on capacity building.  

Related projects and seminars