2 DEVELOPMENT AS SYSTEMATIC LEARNING AND CAPACITY BUILDING Michael Karlberg and Bita Correa This chapter examines an evolving framework for development that has emerged in recent decades within an expanding global network of non-governmental organisations. It began to emerge in Colombia after 1974 with the founding of la Fundación para la Aplicación y Enseñanzas de las Ciencias (the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of the Sciences, or FUNDAEC), a non-profit organisation focused on rural development. The initial experiences of FUNDA- EC’s founding members caused them to question prevailing development para- digms that were the products of theoretical models developed and imposed from afar, rooted in the disciplinary and ideological biases of people who had little knowledge of actual social and economic realities in places like rural Colombia. They sought, instead, to generate insights grounded in systematic learning based on actual experience. In this context, they began with simple lines of inquiry in an action research mode focused on naturally occurring chains of activity in rural communities. These included, but were not limited to, production activities on small farms; subsistence activities outside small farms; agricultural support services and micro- enterprises; community health and environmental sanitation; marketing and the management of funds; education and socialisation; and flows of information (Arbab et al., 1988). Based on the initial learning, FUNDAEC gradually developed a number of interrelated programmes, examples of which include an agro-industrial plant (a space created to help small farmers learn about transforming their products into secondary goods); Grupos Solidarios (solidarity groups focused on helping individuals access microfinance grants to aid them in their production activities); Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (a decentralised high-school-equivalent curricu- lum focused on capacity building within rural communities); Licenciatura en Bienestar Rural (a Bachelor’s degree in rural education); and Especializaciòn en Desarrollo Rural (a post-Bachelor’s specialisation in rural development). In Amy Skinner, Matt Baillie Smith, Eleanor Brown, and Tobias Troll (eds). 2016. Education, Learning and the Transformation of Development, 19-35. Routledge. [ ]