ABSTRACT
International development agencies have long been critiqued for their propensity to support top-down, short-lived, and one-off projects that fail to produce sustained benefits for their intended beneficiaries. In response to this tendency, it has become commonplace in relation to development projects to think it possible to improve the capacities of local project recipients to sustain project outcomes. In the Pacific, where small island states are commonly regarded by donor agencies as facing capacity constraints, community capacity-building is ubiquitous, at once referring to everything and nothing, and leading to contestation over meaning. Certainly, analysis of project documents and public relations materials of aid agencies operating in the Pacific region illustrates the common use of this phrase ‘capacity’ as a descriptor both for what is ‘wrong’ and ‘what is needed’ in island countries.
