Our proposal focuses on a theoretical framework intended to characterise and understand capacity development processes oriented towards the promotion of a critical development practice, an approach that faces the tensions between reformist and critical views of development management. This is what we call capacity development for emancipatory social change. From this viewpoint, we explore a postgraduate university programme in development management offered by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain), with a twofold aim: first, to carry out an inquiry of the programme as a capacity development process in the training of critical development practitioners and second, to discuss the suitability of the framework for understanding similar capacity development processe