Building capable communities: promoting and evaluating community capacity

Further information

Introduction to the "domains approach" to community capacity development

Full report: what Exchange lunchtime discussion participants thought of the domains approach

Key points: Exchange lunchtime discussion 16 March 2004

Glenn Laverack, author of Health Promotion Practice: Power and Empowerment, believes the "domains approach" can help a community shape the agendas of "top-down" health and development programmes and develop skills and knowledge that will last when the programme ends.

The domains approach offers a systematic way to represent bottom-up needs to top-down programmes: it asks communities to focus on nine areas (domains) where individuals and groups have most opportunity to mobilise themselves for greater control over their lives. A set of workshops result in visual representations of a community's strengths and weaknesses. These form the basis of strategic planning and evaluation.

Who has the power?

There is a fundamental tension between top-down programmes, which distribute most of the world's health and development resources, and the development ethos of giving people the responsibility to tackle key issues and improve their lives. But, as Laverack emphasises, the domains approach offers one way to bridge the gap between what health and development workers say and know about the importance of capacity development, and the disempowered situation of many communities engaged in programmes.

Monitoring and evaluating the process of capacity development as well as the outcomes is key to the approach.

How long does change take and how do you measure it?

Programme funding usually lasts for three to five years, but it takes longer - perhaps 10 to 15 years - to bring about sustainable change. This is one of the contradictions the domains approach seeks to tackle with ongoing, community-led planning and evaluation.

• Find out what discussion participants thought of the domains approach in the Full report...
  
• See Introduction to the "domains approach" for a brief description of the methodology.
  
• See Lunchtime discussions for summaries of previous discussions.