Global Advocacy Team

For too long, development processes have overlooked the very people whose lives, homes, livelihoods, and environments are most impacted. This often leads to harms, leaving communities in a more precarious state than before. Communities hold the deepest knowledge about their own realities, needs, and aspirations. When development planning recognizes and harnesses these local voices and expertise, they create meaningful change that truly serves the people they aim to support.

At the International Accountability Project (IAP), we believe genuine development can only be achieved when communities are recognized as experts and leaders. We have challenged the top-down model through the Global Advocacy Team (GAT) initiative and shown that when development starts with community expertise, priorities, and respects environmental and human rights, real change happens. Communities have taken the lead in shaping their own futures, transforming their lived experiences into effective campaigns and policy solutions that create lasting impacts locally and globally.

The GAT initiative brings together incredible community activists and collectives from around the world to reinforce local campaigns with community-led data and collectively change how development is designed, funded, and implemented. ​​United across cultures and continents, GAT members channel their communities’ challenges into collective power. They amplify unheard voices and transform local struggles into global advocacy for development justice.

The Global Advocacy Team (GAT) on Community-Led Development Planning is a co-created, and collectively-led initiative that empowers communities to lead their own development planning. Following global and regional consultations in 2021 with 53 people, including members of the first GAT initiative, and experts in community-led development, the global recommendation came up as the foundation for the second iteration: “Start with a People’s Plan.” Representatives from local, regional, and international civil society and movements participating in the expert meetings nominated and selected their representatives to form the GAT Advisory Group. provided strategic support and guidance to ensure the process remains accountable to the communities we aim to empower.

In 2022, IAP and the GAT Advisory Group carefully selected GAT members from Armenia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe. These dedicated GAT members are working tirelessly to secure their land, resources, culture, and a healthy environment for future generations. Their 4-year journey, facilitated by IAP with support from our allies and movements, through a series of co-learning sessions, has proven a powerful truth. Despite escalating security threats and natural disasters exacerbated by the environmental crisis, the global majority can indeed create change and build a different future. Throughout this journey, GAT members designed and conducted their own community-led action research processes in 7 countries.

The invaluable findings and insights from each community-led research project were then presented and discussed during an impactful week-long learning exchange in Thailand. In May 2024, IAP and the GAT proudly launched our collective report, In Search of a Different World: Turning Dreams into Community-Led Development Plans, communities as rights-holders, knowledge-keepers, and changemakers in the development process. This powerful report shares the valuable lessons learned, collective insights, and recommendations from the GAT’s community-led research across 7 countries. IAP and the GAT are using these recommendations to advocate towards governments, companies, and development banks, promoting community-led development as a viable alternative.

When communities lead their own development processes, inspiring transformation takes root. Building from the community-led research and 10 actionable recommendations, GAT members worked with more than 1,000 people from their beloved communities who contributed their visions and solutions for a better future. Together, they created  7 unique community-led development plans, each plan precisely tailored to address specific challenges, fears, hopes, and dreams to strengthen community resilience and pave the way for a more just and equitable future. This isn’t development done to communities—it’s development led and lived by them.

The GAT initiative has been instrumental in advancing community-led development planning and amplifying grassroots voices in global and local spaces. While this second GAT initiative formally concludes, we remain committed to supporting community-led development advocacy.

While this second GAT initiative formally concludes, we remain committed to supporting community-led development advocacy. Reach out to us to sustain continued collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and strategic engagement by emailing us at gat (@) accountabilityproject.org. Follow IAP on social media – Facebook: bit.ly/IAP4FB and Twitter: @4accountability.

The first Global Advocacy Team (GAT) initiative began with a powerful premise: those who experience development firsthand are best equipped to improve it. Who better to advise on improvements than those whose lives have been profoundly shaped by development projects? From 2013-2016, IAP hosted the first GAT from 8 different countries and contexts: farmers and rural communities in Burma, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe; urban neighborhoods in Cambodia and the Philippines; and indigenous groups in Egypt, Mongolia, and Panama.

The inaugural team convened for a transformative month-long program in Washington, D.C., in October 2013. During this period of working and living together, they exchanged ideas, shared personal stories, and identified priority areas for their research. They also engaged with over 25 officials and staff from the World Bank and the U.S. Government, sharing their research project and seeking input on how to make their findings most useful for policymakers.

In 2015, IAP and the first GAT launched Back to Development — A Call For What Development Could Be. This impactful report is a direct appeal to those who fund and design development projects. Local communities, especially those who have faced negative impacts from development, will likely find shared ideas and a profound sense of solidarity within their eight chapters. This report is made for everyone who believes in the power of participatory project design, relying on local priorities, plans, and expertise to truly improve lives. This report also serves as a continuation of ideas and actions that will return development to its true purpose.