Assessing the ACCA programme: turning Asia’s community upgrading initiatives into an open university

One of the cornerstones of academic legitimacy is the concept of peer review, in which any book, journal article or scholarly exploration that gets published is first assessed by academics from the same sphere of expertise, who are best placed to understand that work. This has not transferred into mainstream development practice, where most development projects (even those being implemented by the urban poor themselves) are not assessed by community groups and NGO supporters who are their peers, but by outside professionals who visit the project briefly. Although these professionals have no expertise in living in informal settlements on very low incomes or avoiding eviction or negotiating with local governments, they pronounce judgement on the project. These supply-driven kinds of assessments and the principle of “judgement by neutral outsiders” does not fit with the concept of demand-driven development processes that are implemented in different ways by different groups in different places, in response to very different local contexts, needs and capacities. The implementation of the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme has sought to build a new, more horizontal system for assessing, learning from and refining the hundreds of projects it supported in different countries. Teams of community leaders, and their partner NGOs who are actively implementing their own ACCA projects, assess the work of their peers in other nations through visits to ACCA projects and discussions with the people who are implementing them. This paper describes the six assessment trips organized so far and how this more demand-driven assessment process is helping adjust and correct problems in the implementation processes in various cities. This has also opened up a large new space for two-way learning, sharing and building mutual assistance links across Asia, and helping expand the range of what community people see as possible.