Attachments
BACKGROUND
The organisations backing this document (see back cover) have been working for several years on the elaboration and dissemination of methods for the assessment of local building cultures (LBC), especially regarding their potential to contribute to Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), and to shelter and housing responses in conflict and post-conflict situations. The aim is to facilitate the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of LBC and the opportunities they offer – in an adapted version if necessary – in housing reconstruction, retrofitting or improvement projects. In doing so, it is essential to consider that families and communities often live in changing environments due to factors such as conflict, climate change, urbanization, globalization, and transforming socio-cultural attitudes. Thus, even if local practices are meaningful, they are challenged, and it is still advisable to find locally manageable solutions and limit innovations so that they can be adopted toward sustainable development and increased local resilience capacity. SRPs are part of a broader set of tools and documents developed and used to facilitate contextualization of responses. They are one of the proposed activities of the Protocol “Informing choice for better shelter” in its step 1 “Understanding the context”, developed by the “Promoting Safer Building Working Group” (now evolved towards Recovery CoP) of the Global Shelter Cluster.