UN-Habitat supports cities and countries all over the world to strengthen governance by improving the coordination and transparency of institutional frameworks; empowering representatives of urban stakeholders and constituencies through inclusive sound institutions and mechanisms; and providing predictability and coherence in urban development plans to enable social inclusion, sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, and environmental protection. The rationale being that the…

This is the third edition of UN-Habitat’s Policy, Legislation and Governance Section Annual Report. The report demonstrates the Section’s position within UN-Habitat’s strategic context, and also links this area of work to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda. The report provides insights into our initiatives and collaborative efforts with all our partners, and presents progress made and results achieved in 2022. It presents these achievements along four focus areas…

The Digital Rights Governance Project in Europe aimed at supporting cities to develop capacity and engage people to mainstream this human rights-based approach, by providing both normative and practical guidance to ensure that the human rights mechanisms that are in place offline are also in place online. This report summarises learnings from the project and pilots in the City of Brussels, Dublin, Tirana and Sofia and tools to operationalise the guidance in cities.

This study identifies formal and nonformal land professionals’ categories, their current functions and the additional roles that they would need to take up to improve land governance and establish functioning and fit-for-purpose land administration systems in the Arab region. The study highlights the common challenges faced by land professionals and takes stock of their current capacities, the additional capacities they would need, and the interventions that would enable them to adequately play…

This second mission of UN-Habitat was deployed to Ukraine to prepare for the upcoming launch of UN-Habitat’s activities in the country, in line with the requests from its Executive Board (March 2022) and a request from the government of Ukraine (July 2022). It allowed the team to address a number of issues that required clarification before the establishment of UN-Habitat in Ukraine.

This paper was initially the input from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) Policy, Governance and Legislation Section to The State of Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture, prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) office for the Near East and North Africa (NENA).

This background paper was meant to contribute to the chapter on “Territorial governance and the urban-rural interface” prepared by FAO. However,…

UN-Habitat provides technical assistance and advisory services to member states in legal reform processes to bring about social and economic transformation and enhance effective service delivery for sustainable urban development. Benchmarking case studies and comparative analysis are key aspects of the UN-Habitat methodology for legal and governance reform.

This report showcases benchmarking case studies on public participation in four countries prepared for the project “…

The State of Arab Cities report covers various issues that currently characterise the Arab region. The report presents the state of urbanisation in the region, with its key drivers and urbanisation trends and explores a selection of major challenges and opportunities in the region. The report then presents the need for a paradigm shift in urban infrastructure, illustrating emerging infrastructure opportunities that could contribute towards building a more sustainable future for cities, and…