What is capacity building and where is the evidence about how to do it well?

The ILC National Readiness Grants and ILC Jurisdictional Based Grants offer a mechanism to make social change for inclusion but they also offer interesting challenges. One of the main platforms of the ILC is 'capacity building' a notion and practice with a very long and contested history. The critiques of capacity building are important (see a nice summary in Susan Kenny's Developing Communities for the Future (2011, pp.194 onwards), but I am not going to focus on these here. Instead I am interested to explore how we share information about the methods to be employed to achieve change.

I recently set an assignment in my 3rd year class (Disability and Inclusion major students in the Bachelor of Health Sciences at Deakin University). The assignment mirrored the recent ILC grants round, and asked students to engage with problems related to inclusion and design a project/response including evidencing why the response chosen would work, be most appropriate etc. This turns out to be quite a difficult task! For example, we decide we want to chance negative attitudes to disability in society - what is the evidence for the best way to do this? There is plenty of evidence about the 'problem' but it is much harder to marshal the evidence about the 'how to' of fixing it. Even where evidence exists (and it does in many instances), how do non government agencies, community groups, local government and other social change actors, gain access to it? On reading student assignments, I could see a wealth of good research work and proposal design going to waste - if only we could share these ideas and evidence and use them to collectively design even better responses, engaging with those most affected by the issue.

In short, this exposes a fundamental issue - how can we best effect social change if we lack the mechanism to share and collaborate on 'answers'? I'm loath to suggest a 'clearinghouse' of evidence and ideas, but somehow we need a way to better connect the dots. Perhaps, if better resourced, the NDIA (ILC) could play a role as a project developer or at least hatcher of collaborations. Maybe the better process might be to match all those worthy projects and organisations on the same problem, and fund the think tank and implementation of these, collaboratively rather than competitively. Could we achieve that level of radical process in our brave new NDIS world?