An extensive support infrastructure lies behind much service delivery in the third sector, provided through a complex and diverse range of umbrella bodies fulfilling different functions and representing different alliances of third sector organisations at national, regional and local levels. This chapter examines this contested field to ask what role is played by these bodies, and how this changes over time in response to wider contextual and policy developments in the move away from a well-resourced and accommodating environment for the third sector. The chapter charts the debates surrounding these changes, and concludes with an assessment of how key assumptions about the role of capacity building are changing, both in terms of how it is organised, and what it is for. It is suggested that this amounts to the emergence of a more explicitly 'positional' approach to capacity building in an increasingly competitive environment for third sector organisations.