What's Missing? Adding context to the urban response toolbox

Recognition of the need for humanitarian response to be ‘context relevant’ has been increasing. It comes up in discussions on coordination, accountability, localisation, and effectiveness and is now broadly accepted as something humanitarian response should be striving towards. Despite this awareness, there is little clarity about what context relevance looks like or how to achieve it.

In order to explore whether ‘context tools’ can help improve humanitarians’ ability to think and act more effectively in urban environments, this paper looks at context, identifying ‘tools to understand context’, and how to use humanitarians use these tools most effectively.