This is the second volume in the CSIS series Managing Absorptive Capacity. For the first volume, Rethinking Absorptive Capacity: A New Framework, Applied to Afghanistan’s Police Training Program, Kathryn Mixon and I did an extensive review of the published literatures on related topics and introduced a new conceptualization that treats absorptive capacity as a by-product of the donor–recipient relationship. That is, absorptive capacity exists only in relation to the design and intent of a particular project or program (or “intervention,” in the terminology of this report).
Our concept stands in contrast to the conventional understanding, which treats absorptive capacity as an objective feature of recipient institutions, communities, or societies and as something that can be improved through capacity building. In our approach, absorptive capacity can be improved not only by building the capacity of recipients but also by modifying the design and intent of the intervention itself and by improving the donor’s own delivery capacity as well.
On the basis of this concept, we developed a framework for analyzing absorptive capacity, taking into account the design and intent of the particular intervention under study, the assumptions (or “prerequisites”) on which the success of the intervention rests, the implementation capacity and political economy of the recipients, and the delivery capacity of the donors. As a “proof of concept,” we applied a thin version of this framework to Afghanistan’s police training program and published the results in the first volume.
In this report, we again apply the framework, with minor modifications based on lessons from the proof-of-concept exercise, to three additional cases of security and justice programs: in Lebanon, Cambodia, and Colombia. The purpose of the first volume had been to determine whether absorptive capacity in general was an objective feature of recipient societies (the answer was no) or a function of the “fit” between donor and recipient capabilities and objectives (yes). The purpose of this volume was to see what we could learn about absorptive capacity specifically in the security and justice sectors by using the framework developed for the first volume. (The full framework is being published separately as a policy brief.)
The idea for this project emerged during our research on civilian efforts in Afghanistan, with funding support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. That project enabled us to do some initial research on the concept of absorptive capacity in the Afghanistan context. Most of the research presented in the first volume and all of the research presented in this report and the accompanying policy brief were made possible with the support of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). I am extremely grateful to the Security and Justice team of DFID’s Conflict, Humanitarian, and Security Department for supporting this research with a grant from DFID’s Policy Research Fund. In particular, Mike Hollis, Macha Farrant, and Peter Diston have provided us much-appreciated support and feedback during the course of this project and I thank them personally.
My coauthors, Kathryn Mixon and Andrew Halterman, have been strong collaborators on this effort. A good deal of credit for the final product is due to their intelligence, feedback, and hard work. Sadika Hameed and Joy Aoun on my team provided support to this effort as well. I take full responsibility for any remaining shortcomings. Interested readers are invited to contact me with any criticism or feedback that might help us improve the framework as we test it in the field—including in the health, education, public, and private sectors—and develop it into a formal assessment tool. Feel free to contact me at rdlamb@csis.org.
Robert D. Lamb
Washington, D.C.
May 2013