Designing Capacity Development for Disaster Risk Management : A ...

Introduction
Introduction
The impacts of disasters are not evenly distributed in the world.
Most of the death and devastation occur in developing
countries 1,2 , posing a major threat to sustainable development
and to the Millennium Development Goals 1,3 . The international
community urges wealthier countries and international
organisations to assist these countries in developing their
capacities for disaster risk management 4 , and donor agencies are
designing policies for how to further integrate disaster risk
reduction into their official development assistance 5,6 . In other
words, to support the development of resilient societies and
communities.
While the importance of capacity for disaster risk management is
widely recognised as a requisite for resilience, it is less clear for
many how to assess, develop, evaluate and sustain it. There are
increasing numbers of methods and tools available for capacity
development, but lessons from past projects point to many
inappropriate approaches with short-­‐lived impacts 7 . This is
especially challenging as most methods and tools are general and
not tailored to the specific context of disaster risk management 8,9 .
Most of the challenges for capacity development are however not
new and particular to the context of disaster risk management,
but have been challenging for international development
cooperation for decades. In 1969 USAID commissioned a study
that found common challenges in their projects, concerning vague
planning, unclear responsibilities and difficult evaluation, which
triggered the development of the Logical Framework Approach 10 .
Versions of the Logical Framework Approach has since then
spread to most donors of international development cooperation,
such as SIDA 11 , NORAD 12 , CIDA 13 , AUSAID 14 , GTZ 15 . Even if the
Logical Framework Approach has received criticism over the
years 16,17 , it is a pragmatic methodology for the design,
monitoring and evaluation of projects and is often required to
qualify for funding.
1