Virtually every humanitarian agency talks about their commitment to building – or enhancing – Southern capacity. To our surprise, however, our call for papers for this issue did not produce the flood of articles we expected. Perhaps this tells us something about lack of fit between rhetoric and reality? Do international agencies still define ‘capacity building’ in a way which implies that Southern recipients have no capacity to start with? Is the capacity-building industry a North-driven, patronising and uni-directional transfer of knowledge? Is there genuine commitment to helping nationally-based organisations respond to future crises? The first 15 articles in this issue address these and other questions.

This issue – published in English, Arabic, Spanish and French – also includes 23 articles on a wide range of other subjects.