Place-based Humanitarian Response - launching the new Shelter, Land and Site Coordination cluster.

This networking event brings together practitioners, governments, donors, academics, civil society groups working to ensure coherent and effective responses to crises that affect the places where people live, settle, and rebuild their lives. It highlights the integrated, place-based approach of the newly launched global Shelter, Land and Site Coordination (SLSC) Cluster, showcasing both conceptual thinking and practical examples of how this more integrated approach can improve humanitarian responses. People affected by crises live in a wide range of displacement and settlement settings, often for prolonged periods. Many rely on self-recovery with support from local actors, yet continue to face significant challenges in accessing safe, dignified housing and basic services. Humanitarian crises are becoming increasingly complex and protracted, in which traditional distinctions between camp and non-camp settings, emergency and recovery, are rapidly breaking down. In line with the UN’s “humanitarian reset,” the newly activated SLSC Cluster brings together the work of the Shelter, Camp Coordination and Camp Management, and Housing Land and Property clusters into a reimagined, integrated coordination platform. This new cluster will attempt to reframe the humanitarian approach to support people affected by conflict, disaster or both, where they seek safety, through place-based, community-driven and climate-smart coordination. It will draw on lessons learned from 20 years of humanitarian coordination, including the area-based approaches and the Global Shelter Cluster’s Settlements Approach. This event will be curated as an interactive networking space. Participants will hear the logic for merging these areas of work and then current examples of this collaboration in practice – and what it means for those affected by crises. This will likely include drawing on work in Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Latin America and Sudan, where tools and approaches enable more integrated response, that can include being better prepared when crises occur. Following these inputs, participants will generate ideas and examples, particularly relating to work in urban settings, teasing out insights that help provide pathways to longer term recovery and the invaluable role of local and national actors.