Capacity Bridging: Balancing Power in Funding Relationships
By Chris Allan, Ajabu Advisors LLC and January O’Connor, Raven’s Group LLC
July 02, 2025
How can partners support and strengthen each other when power is unevenly distributed—such as between funders and grantees, scientists and local informants, or policymakers and local implementers? These inequitable power dynamics are common, but strong partnerships are possible when both sides use their complementary strengths. This is the essence of capacity bridging — to honor and implement the unique advantages each partner brings to make collaboration more effective.
In funding relationships, for example, funders often have access to exclusive networks and decision-making spaces, while grantees bring local knowledge, relationships, and cultural fluency essential for effecting lasting change. By coming together in cooperation and reciprocal sharing of strengths and information, the partnership of the two is more successful than each keeping their strengths to themselves.
Unlike capacity building, which implies a one-way transfer of knowledge from a more powerful to a less powerful party, capacity bridging is reciprocal. Both parties share knowledge, skills, and networks, transforming meetings into exchanges rather than transactions.
But achieving this shift requires intentional change in attitudes and practices. Based on our work with funders and grantees, we’ve identified three core strategies:
Open Spaces for Influence
- Accessing spaces: Reduce gatekeeping by opening up exclusive decision-making forums. Funders can bring partners into boardrooms or invite them to speak at funder-only events, helping them build their own networks.
- Adapting spaces: Go beyond inclusion: reshape spaces to equitably share power. For instance, the Green Climate Fund opened input procedures to civil society and adopted an Indigenous Peoples Policy after joint advocacy, ensuring those most affected had a voice in funding decisions.
Deepen and Broaden Relationships
- Strengthen relationships: Move from transactional to collaborative partnerships. When funders and grantees engage in joint problem-solving and open dialogue, they can better align on what’s working and what needs improvement.
- Build networks: Extend beyond bilateral ties to form multi-stakeholder coalitions that pool influence, expertise, and capacity for greater impact.
Improve Mutual Understanding
- Cultural competence: Partners often operate in vastly different social, political, or linguistic contexts. Bridging these differences and understandings increases each partner’s ability to act effectively within unfamiliar environments.
- Shared definitions: Clarify language and expectations. A partnership between Peruvian civil society groups and a U.S. NGO nearly broke down over differing goals—banning vs. regulating a mine—until they aligned on a joint advocacy strategy.
- Language justice: Use language to share power and increase accessibility. Multilingual partnerships can broaden their reach—using local languages for community organizing and dominant ones (like English) for policy engagement.
In summary, effective capacity bridging relies on mutual respect and recognition of what each side offers. It’s not just common sense, it’s a practice that requires intention, humility, and ongoing intentional effort by those with the means and opportunity to do so.