Capacity Building for SDIs

Abstract

Capacity building is an essential component of any institutional reform such as building land administration infrastructures or spatial data infrastructures (SDI). However the capacity building concept is often used within a narrow meaning such as focusing on staff development through formal education and training programmes to meet the lack of qualified personnel in a project in the short term. This article argues that capacity building measures should be addressed in the wider context of developing and maintaining institutional infrastructures in a sustainable way, even if the key focus may be on education and training to meet short and medium term needs. This article develops the capacity building concept and looks at capacity assessment and capacity development as the two key components. Within capacity development it considers the levels and dimesions of capacity.The paper then introduces the evolving SDI concept and explores how capacity building is essential in delivering an operational SDI. In order to resolve the difficulty of applying the complex and often unclear nature of capacity building to the evolving and similarly unclear nature of SDI, capacity building for SDI in Australia is used as a case study.The paper also identifies that the SDI concept is less easily transferred to developing countries and as such raises the role of SDIs in developing countries as an important un-answered question for the Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific to consider.