Sustainable housing as a contributor to community resilience

Humanitarian shelter interventions are usually focused on providing short-term shelter solutions for people affected by disasters or conflict. However, humanitarian shelter practitioners have long maintained that shelter is “more than four walls and a roof”, identifying shelter as a foundational component of long-term disaster recovery and reconstruction for communities. In recent years, there has also been a significant focus on delivering humanitarian practice that can provide ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’ solutions for affected populations. What this actually means in practice varies across organisations and contexts, but often results in shelter programmes that aim to deliver ‘sustainable’ housing to communities that are seen to be ‘resilient’ to future potential hazards and threats.

This thesis aims to examine the links between sustainable shelter / housing provision and community resilience in post-disaster response and recovery. It focuses on the influence that shelter interventions can have on social relationships within communities. Practitioners and researchers alike have acknowledged the impact of humanitarian shelter intervention on community social dynamics is poorly understood in post-disaster contexts - this research contributes to the discussion with a hope of improving practice in this area. By exploring the views of experienced practitioners on their own perceived influence on communities and examining the social dynamics between groups on the ground in southern Malawi, this research sheds light on how shelter and housing construction processes shift communal relationships over time.

Utilising a case study approach with several communities recovering from cyclones Ana (2022) and Freddy (2023) across southern Malawi, this thesis builds on previous studies in the region to understand how engagement in shelter programmes is shifting components of community resilience in a location that is experiencing significant climate-related challenges. The research findings indicate that the shelter ‘process’ is of greater importance to community dynamics than the shelter itself, with engagement in the construction process providing a key sense of connection to a programme and to surrounding neighbours and host community members. The research also finds that individual sense of security and connection to place shift over time as construction develops. It further explores how this may influence community resilience over time. The relationship between NGOs and the communities they operate in is also investigated to enhance our understanding of how humanitarian intervention impacts existing social structures in affected populations.

An important contribution of this research is the application of social science approaches onto traditionally technocratic humanitarian practice; this allows better understanding community-level impacts of the practice and enables practitioners to focus their own monitoring and evaluation more directly on these wider impacts of shelter and settlement assistance. This is critical for ensuring that the claimed social outcomes of shelter interventions are accurate, and for informing decision-making in the early phases of disaster response.