3: Power

h: professionalisation

This term is very caught up in current debates about 'capacity building'. One of the issues germane to the debate is whether community capacity can be equated to the capacity of individuals within that community (see above). To what extent does it depend upon one or two people, charismatic or not, especially in their use of development tools. It can be argued that increasing the necessary skills and knowledge increases individuals' abilities to carry out tasks that give positive outcomes to themselves, their local communities, and the extra-local communities who are providing some of the support for the project. In this sense, professionalisation can be seen to be a process that enables members within a community not only to contribute towards the internal development of that community, but also to successfully work with external communities to direct development towards the local.

It was pointed out that most approaches, even to bottom-up development are reactive not proactive. It was suggested that a programme of proactive investment in skills, through the inculcation of skills in individuals, would be a very effective way to invest in community development. This would satisfy the need to help communities help themselves. However, it is equally important that administrations, bureaucracies, agencies seek to increase their capacities to act through better knowledge and understanding of people and communities. The notion that it is only communities who need 'capacity building' was not only misleading, it actually misunderstands the issues that increasingly divide the 'governed' (people, communities) from the 'governors'.