Assessing Capacity and Capacity Development in Public Health Community Nutrition Interventions.

This thesis explores capacity changes and interactions between individuals, communities and organisations and how this influences the development of successful community-based interventions. It identifies better practices for researchers and practitioners to assess capacity and capacity changes in community-based interventions. The findings highlight the dynamic change processes affecting capacity development and that relationships and communication processes are fundamental to create sustainable healthy communities. This research contributes valuable new evidence about a concept not previously described around capacity in public health, that being adaptive capacity, or adaptability. New opportunities for researchers to assess capacity changes using adaptive capacity methods may lead to improvements in capacity assessment in public health community-based interventions.