Browsing by Author "Pörsti, Anna Maria"

Empowerment became a major purpose for development interventions in the 1990s. Many interventions also include capacity building that can boost partners’ empowerment and aid effectiveness. Yet, what is an empowered organisation and how or if empowerment occurs, lacks evidence and agreement. There is also limited evidence on capacity building of civil society organisations (CSOs), and when studied, actors have faced methodological and practical challenges. Public support to development cooperation has been weak. There is demand for well grounded, context sensitive studies of development interventions. This thesis participates in discussion related to these themes by applying the non-mainstream realistic evaluation in studying CSOs’ empowerment and its facilitation with capacity building. Three research questions focus on CSOs’ mechanisms and mechanism changes and their influence on CSOs' development and empowerment during capacity building. The study also intends to analyse the influence of the intervention and other context on related developments in CSOs. The fourth question touches a tool that was to be developed to facilitate studying these issues with the approach of realistic evaluation and thus to increase understanding on the application of the approach to the evaluation of capacity building and empowerment of CSOs in development interventions. The data was collected with ethnographic and participatory methods as part of an evaluation of the studied capacity building intervention in Kenya and Finland. The data analysis involved narrative analysis and analytical induction. The thesis shows that mechanisms are closely linked to each other and the context that together strongly influence CSOs’ development and empowerment. They bring more potential to develop in all capacity dimensions and empower sustainably the more a CSO has mechanisms beneficial for all organisational development. The most important is the mechanism of holistic development. According to the results, interventions can contribute to the existence and establishment of such mechanisms. However, changing mechanisms hindering CSOs’ overall development may stay beyond interventions’ reach. Intervention efforts and beneficial mechanisms do not guarantee CSO empowerment which depends on various internal and external conditions. Nevertheless, considering mechanisms could help both interventions and CSOs reach their goals and generate empowerment. The findings confirm that realistic evaluation seems a promising alternative for evaluating social change in interventions. The developed tool could be suitable for studying also other kind of interventions, situations and actors. The research recommends its application and further development or the development of other tools of realistic evaluation for the use of intervention and evaluation practitioners.