AO: Geissler and Tousignant look at the aspects of capacity building which are typically overlooked: “the political and moral charge – for African scientists, clinicians and patients – of skills, technologies, careers, knowledge and care; the contested values, power and futures that capacity might perturb or activate; the incapacities that global health capacity-building initiatives are rooted in, thrive on, reinforce or reproduce; as well as the existing capacities and dreams of capacity that these initiatives often fail to acknowledge, invest in, or engage with.” (350)
AO: The authors argue that, ‘as something to be ‘built’, capacity is often treated as an inherent property of an object, actor or system, which can thus be delivered or deployed, transacted between haves and have-nots” but that by moving beyond specific capacity-building projects, “capacity can also be thought of as potential, projection and direction, as collective memory and futures, as imaginaries of transformation.” With such an extended temporal frame, capacity then becomes a longstanding goal tied to prior social and political projects; as a distributed property of materials, skills, institutions, persons and groups that can be remembered or forgotten, that accumulates, decays, remains and is recomposed; and as a project that takes effect in the future. (353)
