The Global South is facing severe water and delta management challenges. Strong institutions are necessary to find solutions to these water challenges. To improve the understanding on institutions, development of knowledge and skills on institutions could be strengthened among local stakeholders. This process can be referred to as institutional focussed capacity development. In this study, it is explored how institutional focussed capacity development activities among local professionals in the water sector can be evaluated. An analytical evaluation framework for assessing capacity development initiatives from an institutional perspective is proposed. The framework is complemented by a step-by-step approach in which different elements necessary to identify change such as input of an intervention, the output, outcome and impact are specified. These elements are nested on an individual, organizational, and environmental level. The framework allows one to capture the relations between the elements and the interaction with the context through causal relations. To evaluate the development of institutional capacity, the framework is applied to a participatory institutional analysis project in Khulna through an illustrative case study. Moreover, the framework was validated with help of four experts. The study demonstrates that the framework and the step-by-step approach serve as an explorative analysis tool which supports in identifying the crucial elements and the relations of institutional capacity development. The framework allows us to identify different mechanisms of change caused by the process of capacity development and influenced by the contextual factors. The framework contributes to existing work by using causal relations and feedback loops to capture emergent behavior that underlies the process of capacity development. Based on the case study and expert sessions, the study proposes several recommendation to further develop the framework into a second version and to generalize the findings by application to additional cases both within and outside the water sector.