Abstract
AbstractLocal actors affected by humanitarian crises, including disasters and conflict, often attract the support of global actors with engineering resources to support the recovery of their shelter and settlements. Global initiatives increasingly prioritise the agency of local actors and the concept of local participation following humanitarian crises, and a critical mass of evidence of the role of local actors in the recovery of their shelter and settlements has now emerged. This study reviews this body of knowledge and considers its implications on the global humanitarian policy framework. Data have been collected from emerging literature on the recovery of shelter and settlements and extended with sampling cases of 25 crises over the past two decades. This study finds that for the successful recovery of shelter and settlements, the participation of affected households must prioritise their ownership of the recovery process, rather than simply their level of involvement. Furthermore, a focus on local participation appears to be most successful when tailored to the capacity households have to contribute and the shape of their plans for recovery. At the level of global humanitarian policy, a shift in priorities is required if local ownership and successful recovery is to be achieved. These priorities include more broadly assessing local capacity during the immediate aftermath of crisis, paired with systematically funding beyond the first 12 months after a crisis with adaptive funding instruments. The focus of this paper is the recovery of shelter and settlements, but the analysis could be used more generally in other contexts where the need for rapid global response with financial, technical and engineering knowledge coincides with the need to work with local social, political and technical knowledge and experiences.
Highlights
In the immediate aftermath of crises, while the majority of affected households act on their own to address their shelter and settlements needs (Parrack, Flinn & Passey, 2014; Davis & Alexander, 2016; Flinn, Schofield & Morel, 2017; Harriss, Parrack & Jordan, forthcoming), the most vulnerable groups have neither the resources nor the capability to recover and often need the support of global actors
Several policy issues arise from this review of building local and global partnerships for the recovery of shelter and settlement after humanitarian crisis
The policy issues are specific to shelter and settlement but could be generalised to other situations where the opportunity to access rapid global technical engineering needs is open to local actors
Summary
‘Global actors’ can include donor states, the United Nations (UN) and international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs), and this paper uses it mainly to describe INGOs. The term ‘recovery’ is not used in this paper to describe a phase but to describe the whole period from the immediate aftermath of crises to the point where local actors can state that they are recovered. This study begins by considering where local actors appear in the normative framework of humanitarianism that guides the objectives and activities of global actors. This is followed by a brief history of approaches to the recovery of shelter and settlements involving partnership between local and global actors. New evidence is considered concerning the nuances of local–global partnerships for recovery, with respect to measures of success, priorities and time frames, and the influence of the enabling environment provided by the global humanitarian policy framework
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