UN Climate Change News, 26 May 2021 - The Capacity-building Talks, a new public event series, recently zoomed in on solutions for both providers and recipients of capacity-building to make this support more effective and enduring.
Capacity-building programmes in developing countries have often focused on building individual skills. While individual skills-building is always welcomed, capacity-building interventions are more effective and enduring if they focus on building the performance of organisations, enable South-South cooperation, create networks, encourage leadership development, foster ownership and coordinate national and regional activities.
In this context, the second Capacity-building Talks held in May highlighted the need for clarity in the identification of developing countries' capacity-building needs and priorities, as well as the need to ensure that local partners are fully included. Practitioners underlined that local ownership increases the quality of an intervention by engaging the people who can affect or be affected by projects and programmes.
Beyond this, capacity-building interventions can also become more effective if they include functional capacity-building, as opposed to providing only technical capacity-building. Functional capacity-building boosts countries' capacities to formulate and implement policies, creates access to information and knowledge exchange, and initiates and sustains networks. Some practitioners highlighted that in their experience, functional capacity-building was the key to effective and enduring interventions.
Capacity-building is one of the key means of implementation of the Climate Change Convention and the Paris Agreement. The capacity-building framework for developing countries and the Paris Agreement highlight that capacity-building should be country-driven, based on countries' needs and priorities, and foster country ownership.
The Capacity-building Talks offer practitioners and stakeholders, as well as novices and experts in the field of capacity-building, a space to exchange knowledge and share best practices. In doing so, the Talks also aim to strengthen the focus of and work on capacity-building within the UN-led climate change process. As such, the insights from the second Talk will feed into work currently being undertaken in the process.
The second Talk was attended by 88 participants from all world regions and various institutional backgrounds including governments, academia/research, NGOs, international organizations and the private sector. You can access the full report here.
Following their launch in November 2020, Capacity-building Talks are held twice yearly, with the third edition scheduled to take place in September 2021. Registration information for this event will be published in due course on the capacity-building talks main page .
To receive information info on future talks, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with a request to be added to the mailing list.
