Strengthening National Capacities To Formulate And Adopt Housing And Slum Upgrading Strategies

Addressing these housing problemsrequires a shift in thinking and practice by governments and housing practitioners. Such capacity will be enhanced by localising and promoting the Global Housing Strategy (GHS) that was approved by UN-Habitat Member States in 2011, through GC Res. 23/16.   The GHS encourages the formation and participatory management of multilateral partnerships at the national and local level to ensure a “level playing field” of negotiations, through the creation of National Habitat Committees; the enrichment of the global strategy by localised, contextualised successful projects, programmes and strategies and; more importantly, the promotion of inclusive, gender based, rights based equity measures for the urban poor. The GHS therefore assumes a double tracked approach: it is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather tries to instigate horizontal governance at all levels of intervention.

 

The GHS builds on the Global Strategy for Shelter to the Year 2000 (GSS2000), which was approved by 158 Member States between 1988 and 2000 and implemented by UN-Habitat in collaboration with Habitat Agenda partners.  Several lessons have been drawn from this former global initiative, notably that the commodification of housing and the prevalence of market-dominated housing production have negatively impacted the availability of affordable housing supply. Additionally, generalized urban sprawl, the promotion of home ownership over other tenure modalities coupled with the failure of housing markets to adequately respond to a variety of demands have contributed to increasing economic inequality and a divide between developed and under developed urban areas.

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This project will enable the practical roll-out of the Strategy and the development of related capacity in six Least Developed Countries. The project will draw on global processes to formulate housing and slum upgrading strategies that integrate the above concerns, implementing UN-Habitat's Global Housing Strategy at country-level. Six countries will be selected across the three regions of Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean, as per the criteria outlined in section 2.2 below.

 

The Project will also adopt a regional approach of capacity building. The GHS approach is expected to result in an increased commitment of additional countries towards the right to adequate housing, and the principles of inclusive, rights-based and gender-based policy development. Enhanced South-South cooperation will be sought to support capacity development in each country, and the replication and scaling up of the initiative in additional countries of each region. At the global level, it is expected that this approach will result not only in the (re)positioning of housing within the global contemporary debate on economically viable, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive cities but also on critical outputs such as: shift in thinking and practice; systemic reforms promoted; strengthened linkages of housing with other parts of the economy; and decentralization of housing production and delivery systems.

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