Over the past six years (2020-2026), support for capacity strengthening in philanthropy and civil society has undergone a steady and noticeable evolution. Rather than a sudden departure from earlier approaches, this shift reflects an accumulation of learning, political realities, and feedback from organisations themselves. The field has broadened into a more holistic, interconnected understanding of what makes organisations strong, robust and impactful.
Seeing through a lens of interconnected systems
In the last decade both the context and practice of OD have evolved, with an increasingly relational approach. The report, “Funding Organisational Development: A Smart Investment to Multiply Impact", published in 2020 by the Laudes Foundation, MAVA Foundation, Mercator Foundation Switzerland, Oak Foundation and PeaceNexus Foundation, already showed shifts in how funders were approaching OD, including moving away from one-off or ad-hoc capacity‑building grants towards more holistic, strategy‑anchored support; embedding OD within core funding; and increasing peer learning among philanthropic institutions around how to fund and accompany OD work.
This shift has come at a time when organisations are facing growing pressure – from funding instability and shrinking civic space to rising complexity and demand – all of which make resilient, adaptive organisational capacity more critical than ever.
Elevation of resilience and long‑term organisational health
Another noteworthy shift has been the reorientation from efficiency and performance metrics toward resilience and long‑term organisational health. While efficiency and growth once together served as a proxy for effectiveness, funders and organisations have become more conscious of the fragility of overly streamlined systems, especially when exposed to volatility, pressure or crisis. Over time, this has led to a more balanced understanding of success – one that includes identity clarity, leadership continuity, well-being, and strategic coherence alongside outputs.
Centring values, power and equity
A parallel evolution concerns the centrality of values, power and equity within OD practice. Conversations about power dynamics – once peripheral – have gradually moved into donors’ capacity-strengthening frameworks. Funders have increasingly recognised the limitations of compliance-driven modalities and have begun to seek forms of partnership that centre transparency, participation, and shared decision‑making. As this shift matured, equity and justice-related considerations, including decolonising capacity-strengthening support, have become embedded in both vocabulary and practice, though adoption is uneven across contexts.
Changes in language
Language itself has evolved in ways that signal deeper conceptual change. Phrases like “capacity building", which implied deficit and top‑down expertise, have given way to terms that reflect mutuality, agency, and contextual intelligence. This evolution in language has helped make previously implicit power assumptions more visible and has encouraged approaches that value local leadership and lived experience.
Ecosystem-level perspective
Finally, OD support increasingly extends beyond the boundaries of individual organisations toward a field and ecosystem level perspective. There is growing recognition that organisations pursue their missions within interconnected systems of peers, movements, funders, intermediaries, and enabling infrastructure, and that progress toward shared change goals depends on the health of this wider field.
As a result, peer learning, sector-strengthening initiatives, collaborative platforms, and investments in shared infrastructure have become integral components of OD support for partners. This orientation reflects an understanding that supporting a single organisation in isolation is insufficient if the broader ecosystem in which it operates is under strain. Strengthening organisations and strengthening the fields they are part of are therefore seen as mutually reinforcing efforts, with resilience and impact emerging not only from individual capacity, but from ecosystems that are intentionally nurtured and resourced over time.