The UN-Habitat policy guide called the Urban Recovery Framework (URF) is a pragmatic guide that seeks to improve urban recovery responses in cities affected by crises, particularly in post-conflict settings, delivering at scale and with renewal of the social contract. It pursues three broad strategic objectives; i.e., to:

1. Strengthen institutional arrangements and guide investments to optimize recovery impact and to deliver cost-efficient urban recovery;

2. Integrate responses within the ‘humanitarian-development-peace nexus,’ at all stages stabilization, early recovery, resilience, and reconstruction programming, addressing root causes and crises impacts; and

3. Improve urban governance, including strengthening local capacities and participatory mechanisms, promoting local ownership, accountability and to restore the social contract.

Although its author is a UN Charter-based specialized agency, UN Habitat again deviates from the integrated approach of the UN Charter that pursues human rights and sustainable development with peace and security as an integrated approach.

Since OECD introduced the separate ‘humanitarian-development-peace nexus’ and UNDP adopted it in 2019, this iteration of development policy avoids preceding versions while often promoting desired ‘policy coherence,’ as if something new. Avoiding state obligations by replacing them with lower-level  voluntary ‘commitments’ renders the ‘humanitarian-development-peace nexus’ an evasion of standing rules and duties under the UN Charter and international law, more broadly.

Already echoed in the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit outcomes, such crisis-recovery policy coherence was specified in the 2015 Framework for Action for Food Security and Nutrition in Protracted Crises (paras. 15–16). Such coherence means alignment of short-term, emergency relief with longer-term, institution-building development approaches within the framework of human rights obligations, each human right and corresponding obligation having both preventive and remedial dimensions. Central to these obligations of state is the ICCPR-guaranteed human right to remedy, which now has its full and acclaimed definition in international law (A/RES/60/147).

The URF does recognize in its Principle 6, “human rights and protection,” but does not elaborate except to say weakly that it involves “due diligence to consider human rights, protection and social cohesion implications in advance of programming.” While reparations and accountability remain keys to crisis recovery and deterrence, this URF sends victims backward to the task of rehabilitating the hard-won norms of modern statecraft that UN implementation bodies are eroding before our very eyes. Meanwhile, they incubate a culture that, instead, puts the onus on victims to be ‘resilient,’ while remaining mute about their rights and the corresponding preventive and remedial human rights obligations of states.

Photo: Mosul Old City Consultation Forum. Source: UN-Habitat.