Capacity building is increasingly recognized as important for facilitating climate action, yet both the concept and practice have gone largely unquestioned. A primary critique of capacity building in this and other contexts is that it is often the capacitators alone who determine how it is enacted. In response to this critique, there are calls for alternative, solidarity-based approaches to capacity building that include beneficiaries as collaborators. This study relates the employment and outcomes of one such approach to capacity building in the context of heat risk education in San Diego County, California. Across 2022–2023, the authors worked with a local advisory group to co-develop a heat risk education curriculum for peer-trainers to teach to community audiences, as well as an instructional (or capacity building) workshop to prepare them for its use. There were three exploratory capacities of focus: knowledge, preparedness, and confidence. Through review of and reflection on video recordings and notes from meetings between the authors and the advisory group, and analysis of pre- and post-workshop surveys and follow-up semi-structured interviews conducted with peer-trainers, we recount how those capacities were defined, built, evaluated, and sustained. We also call attention to the systemic nature of capacity building by interweaving in that narrative the accompanying roles of pre-existing capacities at individual, organizational, and network scales. Our goal is to motivate similar empirical studies for comparative analysis. Such analysis is needed not only to improve understanding of the concept and practice of capacity building for climate action and for the development of associated frameworks, but also to identify particular approaches that hold promise for the replicability of results and the merit of investment.
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