Capacity building in health promotion, Part 1: For whom? And for what purpose?

Capacity building has been a topic in health promotion literature for several years. Similar constructs that preceded it include community development and community empowerment. More recent constructs, notably social capital and social cohesion, make roughly similar claims on the same social space. This space essentially describes elements of peoples' day-to-day relationships, conditioned and constrained by economic and political practices, that are important determinants of the quality of their lives, and of communities' healthy functioning. In this paper, we discuss capacity building as health promotion means (its instrumental value to other goals) and end (constitutive of the type of human development health promotion espouses). We describe three different uses of the term capacity building and distinguish community capacity indicators from two other types pertinent to health promotion program evaluation: population health indicators, and program-specific indicators. We review seven theoretical and empirical models of community capacity, which provide a total of nine separate capacity domains. A second article in this series takes up issues of community capacity use and measurement in health promotion planning and evaluation.