Reference
Glossary
Every term used across the protocol and the tools, defined in one sentence. Terms marked with a dotted underline elsewhere in the site open these definitions in place.
Core
The central ideas this protocol is built on.
- Capacity Building for Strategic Sustainable Development (CB4SSD)
- Continuous, context-specific work that builds what people and organizations need in order to plan and act strategically towards sustainability.
- Spans collaborative and participatory leadership, Strategic Sustainable Development knowledge, and inner capacity.
- Capacity building
- Strengthening the knowledge, skills and systems that let people and institutions do their work well over time.
- Value–action gap
- The distance between what an organization says it values and what it actually does.
- Capacity-building culture
- The enabling environment — values, leadership, relationships, systems, resources and practices — that lets people and organisations keep developing, applying, sharing and embedding capability.
- The research treats this as a pre-requisite: without it, method and content do not matter.
Frameworks
The research frameworks the thesis draws from.
- Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD)
- Planning towards sustainability by defining success in principle first, then working backwards to today's actions.
- Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD)
- A planning framework that organises any complex challenge into five levels, from system to actions.
- Developed at Blekinge Institute of Technology; the research base for this protocol.
- Five Level Framework (5LF)
- Five layers used to plan in complexity: system, success, strategic guidelines, actions, and tools.
- Backcasting
- Starting from a description of success in the future and planning backwards to what to do now.
- The opposite of forecasting, which projects today's trends forward.
- Sustainability principles
- Basic conditions a society must meet to be sustainable, used as boundaries rather than targets.
Design
What you design against when shaping an intervention.
- Seven perspectives
- The seven design angles for capacity building: values, stakeholders, leadership, strategy and goals, process, resources and tools.
- 5I sustainability leadership model
- Five personal competences for driving change: inner grounding, insight, influence, initiative and impact.
- Competence area
- One of the three capability domains this protocol builds: collaborative leadership, SSD knowledge, inner capacity.
- Collaborative and participatory leadership
- Leading across boundaries — facilitating, negotiating and holding processes where many parties decide together.
- Inner capacity development
- Growing the inner side of change: self-awareness, resilience, relational skill and clarity of values.
People
How participants differ, and why it changes delivery.
- Learner archetype
- A recognisable pattern in how someone engages with learning, used to shape delivery and time commitment.
- Six archetypes: collaborative, enthusiastic, pragmatic/selective, long-term/continuous, time-constrained, opportunistic.
- Cohort
- The specific group of people a capacity-building programme is designed for.
Change
How change moves outward and deepens over time.
- First-order change
- Developmental change: people learn and improve within existing ways of working.
- Second-order change
- Transitional change: the organization's own structures and routines shift.
- Third-order change
- Transformational change: the wider system and its underlying assumptions change.
- Levels of transformation
- Where change lands: the individual, the organization, between organizations, or across society.
- Transformation Zone
- A protected pilot space where a new way of working is tried at small scale before wider rollout.
- Knowledge transfer
- Moving what one person has learned into the hands of others who need it.
Method
Terms used by the diagnostic, profiler and builder.
- Likert statement
- A statement you rate on a fixed scale — here from 'not at all' to 'fully' — to turn judgement into a score.
- Readiness band
- The four levels a diagnostic score falls into: Emerging, Developing, Established, Embedded.
- Emerging below 40%, Developing 40–59%, Established 60–79%, Embedded 80% and above.
- Named gap
- A dimension scoring below 60% — weak enough that the plan should address it directly.
- Learning by doing
- Building skill on a real task with support, rather than in a classroom exercise.