Strong capacity-building through participation

Nowadays, individuals are manipulated by media, government and organizations to make decisions without even realising. Most of us don’t know or don’t want to know about the problems and challenges the world, as a whole, is facing. With the globalization, my actions attitudes and behaviour will probably affect people in all different parts of the globe. Just think about the shoes or clothes that you wearing just now, where are they made? Where do the raw materials come from? How does it get to stores and them you can buy it? In order for Individuals to full fill their consumerism patterns, it is apparent that not many consumers care about all these questions. “It is just a shirt” they would say, or “why should I care, at least whoever is making it has a job”.

The question is, how could we make these people aware that their choices will make a big impact on someone’s life who they don’t even know? One of the answers is through a development of critical thinking explored on the previous post but another way is to build people’s capacity in order to make wiser decision towards the environment and other individuals. Capacity building is defined as “Human resource development, the process of equipping individuals with the understanding, skills and access to information, knowledge and training that enables them to perform effectively” (Wikipedia, capacity building). Capacity is crucial for individuals at any level of society to carry out functions and achieve their development objectives. It is not just about skills and knowledge but also to relationships, values and attitudes.

Sustainable development is a changing process that requires people to be able to adapt in a changing environment where we live today. So how can we build capacity within individuals and organizations? One of the tools is through participation, and why participation? Because it is the only way individuals can really share their experiences, necessities and knowledge and at the same time being able to act together and build a common capacity as a group and as individuals. Participation engages people and empowers them to participate on the process of decision making and feel part of the change, it gives a sense of importance to participants where everyone can give their insights to develop for example a community garden, a community action plan or even a policy. It would be impossible to roll out any project or plan about sustainability without the participation of the community, organizations and government. However the right level of engagement needs to be implemented for an effective participation. Meaningful participation is not easy to achieve, participants most of the times don’t have the same access to power and influence as others participants, but by putting the decision making process and leadership in the hands of the participants you can break hierarchies and create a more deeper and permanent change within the group and/or organization.

During our workshop some of the tools or methods to create participation were shown to us in order to facilitate our own level of participation within us students and with the lecture. One the really got my attention was “The world Café” which consists in a “informal” meeting style where people can share their knowledge about a critical issues but at the same time create a new common knowledge throughout the collaboration of the group. This kind of meeting are held in a more informal way at cafes or even at places where organization creates the whole café experience in order to promote the natural creation and sharing of knowledge. The process encourages individuals to contribute with their opinions in order to generate consensus knowledge. It works in rounds of conversations with a number of small groups organized in tables where all of them are discussing about the same topic and them after a while some participants travel between tables adding their insights to other tables. This process of sharing and participation creates capacity in its participants, it shares the decision making process, it brakes hierarchies and create that connection between individuals.

Just would like to feature a great work done by one of the sports gear industry leader PUMA who is the first company in the world to create an environmental profit and loss report where they measure the organization’s impact in the environment and society but not only that they put a price on their impact within all levels of their operations. For more info on the report please visit http://safe.puma.com/us/en/2008/11/puma%E2%80%99s-capacity-building-programs/.

This report is a great example of the two topics discussed in this post. The first one is capacity building, where PUMA runs projects in parallel with their suppliers in different parts of the world in order to improve their ability to make improvements within their operations on their own. The second is the level of participation and engagement promoted by PUMA through their whole tier of suppliers, employees, community and costumers embedding sustainability in all levels of its operations.