Community-led housing: how to deliver housing for people and the planet

The treatment of housing as a commodity and the persistence and often expansion of informal settlements is restricting people's access to adequate housing. Across the global North and South, this global housing crisis has become a priority among a growing number of civil society organisations, as well as across policy, finance and philanthropy.

Most are aware of the importance of safe and secure housing as a foundation for human development. All of them are asking how to deliver it. Yet few know of, perceive or prioritise community-led housing as an appropriate and effective mechanism to successfully tackle this global housing crisis.

What is IIED doing?

IIED and World Habitat partnered with community-led housing champions and housing justice movements to ensure that policymakers, financiers and philanthropists discover, understand and engage with community-led housing as a key policy tool in the provision of housing.

The partners worked to map and analyse the key obstacles or ‘bottlenecks’ in policy and finance that prevent the implementation of community-led housing. The work contributed to building the evidence base, tools and advocacy strategies necessary to overcome these bottlenecks. This offers key building blocks to promote the conditions that will enable the implementation and scale-up of community-led housing programmes.

The project produced evidence in the form of partner reports that analysed specific contexts and cases to identify key bottlenecks limiting the scale and impact of community-led housing initiatives. 

Through dialogues with partners and other actors engaged in community-led housing, the project provided a space to discuss the challenges of implementing and scaling up these initiatives, and develop joint advocacy strategies and influence policymaking at the local, national and international level. 

The final report, “Community-led housing in the global south: benefits, blockages and ways forward” analysed the social, economic, environmental and political benefits of community-led housing at the household, community and societal level. It also analysed common enablers and blockers to advancing community-led housing, and identified entry points that serve to promote synergies and co-learning between community-led housing initiatives. 

The research also sought to contextualise local findings within wider trends and debates at the international level, as well as to identify challenges and bottlenecks related to other well documented examples of community-led-housing.

IIED and World Habitat also worked with a broad network of community-led housing champions and housing justice movements to mobilise the research findings towards a broader campaign. This included participating in the first session of the Inter-governmental open-ended working group on adequate housing for all to call for developing a roadmap to support collective, non-speculative forms of housing and tenure systems as key mechanisms.

IIED coordinated the work of partners in Brazil (Catalytic Communities), Malawi (Center for Community Organisation and Development), Zambia (Civic Forum on Housing and Habitat) and Nepal (Lumanti Support Group for Shelter), and World Habitat is coordinating the production of case studies from Switzerland (urbaMonde) and Slovenia (Zadrugator).