From Shelter to Housing: Security of Tenure and Integration in Protracted Displacement Settings

This report seeks to analyse how evolving responses to tenure insecurity in settings involving protracted displacement or durable solutions are likely to affect the rights-based model of humanitarian assistance practiced by organisations such as NRC. It begins with a review of the relevant international standards related to security of tenure, focusing on the human right to adequate housing, but also reviewing relevant trends in development and urban planning standards. The next section describes the applicability of these frameworks to displacement settings, including both internal displacement and refugee situations. These general observations are then tested against two case-studies based on analysis of both national policies and NRC programming. The first case-study describes the situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, where political resistance to any measures implying local integration has virtually blocked mean- ingful steps toward security of tenure. The second examines tenure security issues for IDPs in Georgia, where the government is committed to addressing their housing rights but has opted to do so primarily through a programme of privatising collective centres that has had mixed short-term effects and does not provide a clear roadmap for tenure security for IDPs living outside such centres . The report ends with a set of general conclusions and recommendations meant to contribute to the evolution of policy in this key emerging area of humanitarian activity.