Capacity building is increasingly seen as a key component of land administration projects in developing and countries in transition undertaken by the international development banks and individual country development assistance agencies. However, the capacity building concept is often used within a narrow meaning such as focusing on staff development through formal education and training programmes to meet the lack of qualified personnel in a project in the short term. This article argues that capacity building measures should be addressed in the wider context of developing institutional infrastructures for implementing land policies in a sustainable way. Where a project is established to create land administration infrastructures in developing or transition countries, it is critical that capacity building is a mainstream component, not as an add-on, which is often the case. In fact such projects should be dealt with as capacity building projects in themselves. The article introduces a conceptual analytical framework that provides some guidance when dealing with capacity building for land administration in support of a broader land policy agenda.