Moving from short-term relief to supporting recovery remains a persistent challenge for humanitarian shelter and settlements practitioners, particularly as crises become more protracted. This study examines how practitioners conceptualise recovery, the barriers they face, and the strategies used to navigate them. Drawing on cross-national interviews and literature, we find that recovery is understood as a dynamic and non-linear process situated between humanitarian response and development, framed through durable shelter solutions, cross-sectoral connections, and the restoration of dignity and livelihoods. Barriers span financial, environmental, social, and institutional domains, ranging from resource scarcity and land tenure disputes to organisational mandates and governance capacity. Practitioners address these challenges through three prominent strategies: adopting flexible shelter modalities, providing incremental assistance, and using constructive ambiguity to negotiate constraints. These findings conceptualise recovery as an evolving process rather than an endpoint, while offering practical insights to strengthen the humanitarian–development nexus in shelter and settlements. • Growing humanitarian needs demand stronger links from relief to recovery. • Recovery is durable shelter, cross-sectoral, and a dynamic, non-linear journey. • Practitioners adopt flexible shelter modalities to address contextual constraints. • Incremental assistance enables households to progress recovery over time. • Constructive ambiguity helps negotiate political and institutional barriers.
Opdyke et al. (Sun,) studied this question.