This study examines the rise of resilience thinking in international development. It links the resilience concept to changing ideas of capacity and argues that the entwined concepts of resilience and capacity increasingly frame the ways Western donors address societal fragility in the Global South. This study argues that resilience thinking is characterised by pragmatism and a retreat from grand planning as a response to a crisis in how fragility is handled. Increasingly, Western donors take on the role of facilitators, although responsibility for implementation and project success in the name of local ownership and bottom-up approaches is put on to local partners and the recipient state. This study highlights triangularly organised south–south cooperation on ‘coaching and mentoring for capacity’ as a mode whereby donors attempt to create resilience and it argues that this type of programming encapsulates in a paradigmatic manner key features of, and challenges posed by, this agenda.