Evaluation Criteria

If we were to look into the archives to review the Habitat Agenda and its accompanying “habitat debate,” we might encounter a strange sense of déjà-vu. In fact, that is what happens when we refer to any old issue of Habitat International Coalition’s HIC News published around the time of Habitat II.

For example, HIC News (May 1996) faithfully reports on the current habitat debate with arguments, efforts, claims and the expressions of social movements that echo the debate 20 years hence. It records how the human right to adequate housing was argued against overt attempts to repress it. Nonetheless, the “full and progressive realisation of the human right to adequate housing” was affirmed—61 times—throughout the Habitat Agenda. The human right to adequate housing and good governance formed the two main contributions to the Habitat II commitments.

That history begs an evaluative reflection on how we Habitat Agenda Partners did at implementing the Habitat II “Commitments” and “Global Plan of Action”:

Habitat II Commitments (1996)

Human Rights & Good Governance

• Adequate Shelter for All
• Sustainable Human Settlements
• Enablement and Participation
• Gender Equality
• Financing Shelter & Human Settlements
• International Cooperation
• Assess Progress

Among the specific commitments, grounded in treaty obligations, was the Member States’ and the UN’s solemn pledge to protect from, and redress forced evictions. In 1996, Habitat Partners also explicitly committed to combat homelessness. Neither of these core commitments is mentioned in the UN-Habitat Guidelines for preparing national reports [Arabic] for Habitat III.

Many other Habitat II commitments deserve the same inquiry. For this we can take the UN evaluation criteria as a guide.

For this purpose, a summary of the many Habitat II commitments, Habitat II Evaluation Criteria pose standard evaluation methods to enable the promised review of Coordinated Implementation of the Habitat II Agenda. An evaluation of the relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability of performance vis-à-vis the Habitat II agenda would form a welcome basis for heading forward with the basic commitments shared over the past 20 years.

This issue of Land Times takes on these questions in one form or another. The diverse developments toward Habitat III reported here embody these questions, as does this period’s specific review of Sudan’s of its human rights treaty obligations in the matters related to habitat.

The actual usage of the “sustainability” criterion itself comes under closer scrutiny also, not least in the context of new Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and the self-asserting distinction of sustainable urban development, the subject of Habitat III (2016).

This issue of Land Times recalls that the human right to adequate housing does not figure in the “Policy Issues” proffered by UN-Habitat as its own “New Urban Agenda, and all of the specific Habitat II commitments are missing from its National Habitat Reports guidelines. However, applying regular evaluation criteria would aid us, not neglecting the repeated commitment to “the full and progressive realisation of the human right to adequate housing.”

See “In Defense of the Right to Housing in Habitat II,” HIC News (May 1996), p. 7

For more on this subject in the current Habitat Debate, see Habitat III Basics (2015)