Capacity building is a buzzword of international politics. It is a concept through which very diverse activities geared at assisting countries are described. The Sustainable Development Goals rely substantially on the idea that least developed countries require improved capacities to address poverty and other issues. As Venner notes, “capacity building has thus become something that any development assistance organization must do if it is conducting its programmes according to the current ‘state of the art’.” Many observers have noted the considerably conceptual confusion around what the term might mean, while sceptics have argued that the term is little more than a recent fashion.
This concept note presents a basic framework for data collection that allows for capturing maritime security capacity building activities in the SAFE SEAS country cases. It provides guidelines for how we aim at gathering data through desk research, interviews and participant observation in order to study how capacity building is carried out in practice.
The research network for Maritime Security and Ocean Governance