You may have noticed that the book title is capability and not capacity, and even in writing it out for this post I flipped them around originally. In this chapter the authors dive into how they define capability differently than capacity, why it matters in their analysis and even why it matters in policy implementation. They define capability as the “ability of an organization to equip, enable and induce” their bureaucrats to make the right choices to achieve the correct outcome. Capacity is the individual’s ability to recognize and act correctly, but capability is the organization or institutional setup to allow the individuals to produce the correct outcomes. This is not to say that capability is only due to country-level features such as laws. Creating functional and capable organizations is not a top down or a bottom up process, rather one that must be looked at as a whole.
I like how you highlight this important distinction.