Success conditions for international development capacity building projects

- Paper examines ID capacity building project success conditions.
- Paper draws out structural, institutional and managerial success conditions.
- Paper differentiates between initial and emergent success conditions.
- Paper highlights commitment, collaboration, alignment, and adaptation conditions.
- Paper links project success factors and context.

Current research on success factors fails to adequately explain why development projects will achieve success in one setting yet not in others, thus making improvements to project management practice difficult. By examining the underlying conditions enabling project success, we provide additional context and practical meaning for success factors. Through a case-study and a qualitative analysis of twenty interviews with project practitioners, we look into four capacity building projects in Ghana, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam and draw out structural, institutional, and managerial success conditions, whether they are initial or emergent. We further propose a hypothesis that high levels of multi-stakeholder commitment, collaboration, alignment, and adaptation are necessary for projects to succeed. Thus, we put the ability of projects to deliver development into context and call on practitioners to harness their ability to trigger development through a better understanding of enabling success conditions or the right circumstances under which projects thrive.