The publication reviews forty years of development experience and concludes that donors and partner countries alike have tended to look at capacity development as mainly a technical process, or as a transfer of knowledge or institutions from North to South.

According to the literature on regime transition, niches are sources of innovation that may lead to the transformation of the dominant regime, if processes at other level of the system – the landscape and the mainstream regime - are supportive. A focus on actors involved in the transition process and the analysis of their specific role in knowledge networks can help assessing the robustness of a specific niche and its growth potential. Knowledge systems, and in particular the dynamics of local and expert knowledge, have in fact a key role in innovation models.