Global Governance: Who Is Steering the Urban Agenda at Quito+10?

Ten Years On, Housing as a Laboratory for Sectoral Reconfiguration

Simon Deprez, Seconded Expert, Office of the Executive Director, UN-Habitat

The Framework Reaffirmed: The Question of Steering Remains

On 16 and 17 July 2026, the United Nations General Assembly held the midterm review of the New Urban Agenda. On 16 July, it adopted a political declaration (A/RES/80/291) reaffirming the commitment made in Quito ten years earlier and explicitly placing housing at the heart of the priorities for the coming decade [1]. Convened pursuant to Resolution 79/214 of December 2024, the review does not redefine the framework: it reaffirms it, clarifies its priorities and calls for accelerated implementation through 2036.

This reaffirmation comes, however, at a particularly constrained moment for the United Nations multilateral system, marked by a liquidity crisis, declining voluntary funding, budgetary and institutional reforms, and growing challenges to international institutions. Against this backdrop, the decision by a large majority of States to renew their political commitment to the urban agenda is significant. The question is where that commitment is being directed and what it changes in practice.

The issue is less apparent in declarations than in the mechanisms themselves: who produces what, for whom, according to what timetable, through which channels and with what commitments at national level? Within the United Nations system, implementation relies in particular on UN-Habitat, which is responsible for supporting the New Urban Agenda and coordinating its main institutional mechanisms. Viewed from this perspective, the past decade reveals a twofold movement. The broad framework established in Quito remains indispensable as a common reference, but it has shown its limitations as a steering instrument. At the same time, more focused sectoral mechanisms are emerging within this framework, combining knowledge production, intergovernmental dialogue and national implementation. Housing is currently one of the most advanced examples.

The stakes are far from abstract. According to the World Cities Report 2026, as many as 3.4 billion people currently lack access to affordable housing, representing more than 40% of the world's population [2]. This estimate encompasses several forms of deprivation: inadequate living conditions, informality — more than one billion people live in informal settlements — homelessness and unaffordability. And the crisis is global: the worldwide house-price-to-income ratio rose from 9.3 to 11.2 between 2010 and 2023; 44% of tenant households spend more than 30% of their income on rent; and in the European Union, house prices have risen by 60% and rents by 29% since 2010 [3].

Few urban issues speak as directly to citizens and political leaders. Everyone experiences housing, and its cost and availability make it an immediately tangible issue at the intersection of individual concerns and collective choices. It is now widely recognised that housing also provides an entry point to many other Sustainable Development Goals: health (SDG 3), education (SDG 4), employment (SDG 8), climate (SDG 13), and gender and social equality (SDGs 5 and 10). According to modelling by Habitat for Humanity and IIED, improving access to adequate housing in informal settlements could, in certain countries and scenarios, increase expected years of schooling by up to 28% and add an average of up to 2.4 years to life expectancy [4].

Housing therefore provides a particularly revealing lens through which to observe this reconfiguration — and its blind spot: the means of implementation.

Quito: An Agenda of Influence Rather Than Steering

Quito's approach was holistic, as it needed to be: the city is a system, and mobility, land or climate cannot be addressed independently of urban form. Yet this integrated approach, necessary in substantive terms, has proved difficult to translate into a steering instrument. In seeking to cover everything, the agenda struggles to establish priorities; and in addressing everyone, it dilutes responsibilities.

The structure responsible for advancing it therefore relies primarily on influence. The New Urban Agenda is voluntary and non-binding: it has neither an enforcement mechanism nor incentives of its own. UN-Habitat combines normative functions, convening power and technical assistance, but it has no binding authority over implementation by States. World Urban Forums foster networking and visibility and influence the global agenda, but they remain technical, non-legislative forums rather than decision-making bodies.

It is in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda that these limitations become most apparent. Reporting remains uneven and depends heavily on the capacities and commitment of States; 69 national reports contributed to the 2026 midterm review. SDG 11 provides a more structured measurement framework, but it still does not constitute an integrated system for monitoring housing conditions worldwide. Its housing indicator, 11.1.1, illustrates these limitations: the five deprivations it measures — water, sanitation, overcrowding, structural durability and security of tenure — do not capture affordability, even though affordability is explicitly included in Target 11.1 [5].

At national level, responsibility for housing also often remains fragmented across ministries, agencies and levels of government. Moreover, the housing agenda must compete with other agendas that benefit from more structured institutional and financial frameworks, foremost among them climate.

Housing was not absent from the Quito framework: it occupied an explicit place within it. But it remained embedded in a very broad agenda, without a dedicated intergovernmental mechanism capable of organising, over time, knowledge production, dialogue among States and national implementation channels. The issue, therefore, is less a lack of recognition than a lack of steering. It is precisely in this area that the post-Quito decade has seen a significant institutional innovation emerge.

Reconfiguring the Urban Agenda Through Housing

In June 2023, the second session of the UN-Habitat Assembly adopted Resolution 2/7 on adequate housing for all [6]. It established an Open-ended Intergovernmental Expert Working Group on Adequate Housing for All — the OEWG-H — specifically mandated to review and formulate recommendations on policies capable of accelerating progress towards adequate housing for all.

The innovation lies less in the principle of intergovernmental dialogue than in its mechanics. Rotating co-chairs ensure regional representation; expert groups inform the technical work; intersessional meetings allow Member States to review and enrich proposals; and formal sessions provide a framework for intergovernmental discussion. In addition, designated national focal points and a structured work cycle through 2029, based on a roadmap adopted in 2025, provide continuity [7]. The chain is explicit: expertise, intergovernmental discussion, national counterparts and expected outputs.

The workstreams are advancing according to this timetable. Housing finance, security of tenure, informal settlements and social housing were the subject of recommendations reviewed in 2025. Sustainability and resilience, integrated housing policies, definitions of homelessness and informal settlements, the global housing monitoring framework and land tools are feeding into the 2026 cycle, which will culminate in the Working Group's third session in Nairobi on 26 and 27 November.

One simple indicator of ownership of the process is the growing number of national designations: by early September 2026, 80 Member States had appointed focal points, and the intersessional meeting of 3 September brought together approximately 220 participants [8]. Beyond the figures, what matters is the dynamic: public administrations are identifying counterparts and organising themselves around the process. This is precisely one of the links that the broader framework had struggled to institutionalise in order to connect international discussion with a national institutional chain. The July 2026 political declaration acknowledges this development and includes the Working Group among its priorities for action [1].

Resolution 2/7 includes a second knowledge pillar: the Housing Knowledge Platform, designed to bring together data, policies, practices, case studies and tools relating to adequate housing, thereby bringing intergovernmental discussion closer to the instruments required to translate it into public policy.

The reconfiguration is also taking place within UN-Habitat itself. The 2026–2029 Strategic Plan places housing back at the centre of the organisation's work, making access to adequate housing, land and basic services for all its principal strategic entry point [9]. At the same time, the organisation is consolidating its knowledge platforms, country programmes and technical assistance instruments around this priority. The loop between normative work and implementation can therefore be shortened: recommendations, national counterparts, and then knowledge and support mechanisms to translate them into policies and programmes.

The thirteenth World Urban Forum, held in Baku in May 2026 under the theme “Housing the World”, confirmed this renewed focus. The largest Forum in its history — with some 58,000 participants from 176 countries — concluded with the Baku Call to Action: fifteen action areas emerging from stakeholders, including housing finance, multilevel governance and climate resilience [10].

The movement extends beyond UN-Habitat. For the first time, the European Union has a Commissioner whose portfolio explicitly includes housing; in December 2025, it presented its first European Affordable Housing Plan and, in September 2026, an Affordable Housing Act combining a proposed regulation and a recommendation aimed at strengthening the capacity for public action in areas under housing pressure [11]. Housing is also gaining visibility in the climate and social development agendas. At COP30 in Belém, the links between housing, adaptation, resilience and climate justice received greater attention [12]. The Doha Political Declaration, adopted in November 2025 at the Second World Summit for Social Development, explicitly identifies access to adequate, safe, accessible and affordable housing as a condition for social development and calls for housing policies that address, in particular, the needs of the most vulnerable populations [23].

The signal is institutional as much as political: housing is reappearing in mandates, work programmes and public policy decisions. The challenge now is to turn this institutional recognition into capacity for action.

The Tension: Recognition Without the Means

This reconfiguration nevertheless has a blind spot. Ten years after Quito, the political recognition of housing has yet to translate into a commensurate financial effort — whether in development assistance, in the public budgets of many countries, or in financing systems accessible to lower-income households.

Available data on aid illustrate this gap. Between 2019 and 2023, multilateral and bilateral actors allocated approximately USD 54 billion to housing-related interventions, including development bank loans. However, if the scope is narrowed to ODA categories specifically devoted to housing policy and low-cost housing, disbursements amounted to only USD 84 million in 2023, less than 0.05% of total ODA [13].

The recorded flows are also highly concentrated. Multilateral institutions provide eleven times more funding than bilateral actors, and four banks — the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank — account for more than 90% of the multilateral financing recorded. The EIB alone provides more than one-third, almost exclusively in Europe. On the bilateral side, funds from Gulf States predominate; AFD ranks third, with USD 576 million, more than three-quarters of which is devoted to housing finance. Settlement upgrading, meanwhile, is overwhelmingly supported by the IDB, mainly in Latin America. As a result, Europe receives 40% of the financing recorded, and housing funding per person living in poverty is twenty-two times higher there than in Africa [14]. Against a backdrop of a sharp contraction in ODA — down 23.1% in real terms in 2025 [15] — competition with better-funded agendas remains intense.

National budgets tell a similar story. Across the OECD, public investment devoted to housing development fell from 0.17% of GDP in 2001 to 0.06% in 2018, following a decline of nearly 90% between the 2009 peak and 2016. The recovery observed since then has not restored spending to its pre-crisis level [16]. While housing is regaining political visibility, its budgetary translation remains far below current needs.

Financing systems, finally, exclude a large share of households, with young people and those on low or irregular incomes particularly exposed. Across the OECD, nearly half of 15- to 29-year-olds still live with their parents, while the median age of first-time homebuyers in the United States has now reached 40 [17]. Where demand is growing fastest, exclusion can be even more severe. In sub-Saharan Africa, access to a mortgage remained limited to 8.9% of the population in 2023; outstanding mortgage debt represents only a few percentage points of GDP in many African markets, compared with more than 40% in the European Union and nearly 80% in the United States [18]. Mortgage lending, which is central to mature markets, therefore cannot on its own provide a solution for households with low, irregular or informal incomes.

Faced with this gap, the problem is not the absence of instruments but their scale, targeting and articulation. Public-private partnerships can mobilise capital but struggle to reach the most affordable market segments [19]. Housing microfinance is useful for incremental improvements to existing housing, but much less so for access to new housing. Mortgage credit remains beyond the reach of a majority of households in many countries. Social and public housing therefore remain essential instruments, provided they are supported by sustainable financing, robust operators and appropriate land frameworks. Mobilising domestic resources — including land and property taxation, land value capture and public budgets — must also form part of the response [20].

None of these instruments, taken in isolation, will achieve the scale required. Without scaling up and diversifying tenure and financing models, the consequences are already visible: informal settlements continue to expand, particularly in regions experiencing the fastest rates of urbanisation. The number of people living in informal settlements rose from 895 million in 2000 to 1.13 billion in 2024 and could reach 3 billion by 2050 if current trends continue [21].

This growth is all the more critical because informal settlements concentrate significant climate vulnerabilities. Yet climate finance reproduces the same gap: between 2003 and 2023, barely 3.5% of financing approved by 22 major global climate funds targeted the urban poor [22]. The deficit is therefore threefold: housing remains marginal within financing mechanisms; available instruments are insufficiently adapted to the scale of needs and the income profiles concerned; and residents of informal settlements, despite being among the most exposed, remain largely excluded.

The paradox brings us back to the question of steering. Housing provides a particularly powerful entry point into the New Urban Agenda: it conditions effective access to health, education and employment, connects directly with climate adaptation and resilience, and is a central issue in post-conflict reconstruction. If urban governance is being reconfigured through housing, the next step is therefore to draw the financial consequences. The objective is not to finance housing as an isolated sectoral end in itself, but as a structuring component of urban development — and, more broadly, of development itself. The normative momentum is under way; the gaps that now need to be closed concern financing volumes, financial engineering, institutional capacity and the expertise required to adapt solutions country by country.

Post-2030: Embedding the Reconfiguration for the Long Term

The coming milestones will show whether this reconfiguration produces lasting effects. The third session of the Working Group, to be held in Nairobi on 26 and 27 November, represents another milestone: work on integrated housing policies, as well as housing sustainability and resilience, is expected to feed into the body of recommendations being progressively developed towards 2029 [7].

Another milestone is emerging with the first discussions on the post-2030 framework, and a less visible effect of the work under way deserves attention: agreeing on a definition determines what becomes visible in public statistics. Work on definitions of homelessness and informal settlements is therefore not merely a semantic exercise. It could inform future measurement frameworks and, with them, the way needs are compared, prioritised and financed. But these frameworks will still need operational channels through which to take effect.

Technical assistance is also seeking new delivery mechanisms. Building on the partnerships established in 2025 between UN-Habitat, France and the cities of Paris and Nairobi, a Global Housing Hub is being developed to connect local governments, experts and practitioners and facilitate the sharing of housing solutions. The normative agenda is thus seeking operational transmission mechanisms without waiting for the completion of the OEWG-H intergovernmental cycle.

So, weakening or reconfiguration? Both, but at different levels. The Quito framework retains its role as a global reference; its strength lies in the influence it exerts, rather than in a steering function it never had the means to perform directly. Sectoral specialisation offers one possible way forward, and housing currently provides a particularly advanced example. Coherence will not be rebuilt solely from the top down: it can also emerge from a sector which, because it intersects with land, finance, services, climate and social protection, necessarily requires policies to be connected.

International forums remain essential for setting the agenda, building coalitions and sharing solutions. But the real test of this reconfiguration will come afterwards: in housing policy frameworks, finance laws, ministerial structures, statistical systems and national implementation capacities. This is precisely where urban development practitioners have tangible leverage. The preparation of the post-2030 framework will reveal whether this reconfiguration can be embedded sustainably in public policy frameworks.

The views expressed are those of the author alone.

Notes and Sources

[1] United Nations General Assembly, Political Declaration to Renew Commitment and Accelerate the Implementation of the New Urban Agenda.

[2] UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2026: The Global Housing Crisis — Pathways to Action, Nairobi, 2026.

[3] UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2026; European Union: Eurostat, “Ongoing rise: house prices and rents climb further”, 3 October 2025.

[4] Habitat for Humanity and International Institute for Environment and Development, Improving Housing in Informal Settlements: Assessing the Impacts in Human Development, 2023.

[5] United Nations, Metadata for Sustainable Development Goal Indicator 11.1.1; Christine Auclair, “Post-2030: A Housing SDG to Rebuild Urban Equity”, Villes en Développement Bulletin No. 118, “Housing in Question”, AdP – Villes en Développement, 2025, pp. 60–64.

[6] UN-Habitat Assembly, Resolution 2/7, Adequate Housing for All, HSP/HA.2/Res.7, second session, Nairobi, June 2023.

[7] UN-Habitat, Proposed Roadmap of the OEWG-H for the Period 2025 to 2029, HSP/OEWG-H.2025/4.

[8] UN-Habitat, OEWG-H Nominated National Focal Points — Countries and Nominating Institution.

[9] UN-Habitat, Strategic Plan 2026–2029, 2026, paras. 27–28.

[10] UN-Habitat, “Baku Call to Action urges renewed commitment on the global housing crisis”, 22 May 2026.

[11] European Commission, European Affordable Housing Plan, 16 December 2025; European Commission, Affordable Housing Act – A New EU Framework to Support Action Where Housing Is Under Pressure, 9 September 2026.

[12] Hub for Housing Justice, Housing Justice at COP30: Civil Society Voices in the Climate Space, London, July 2026; IIED, Housing Justice and Climate Change in Cities, November 2025.

[13] UN-Habitat, Proposed Recommendations on Housing Finance, HSP/OEWG-H.2025/INF/2, 2025, para. 25.

[14] UN-Habitat, Survey of Existing Multilateral and Bilateral Support for the Development and Implementation of Effective Housing Policies, Programmes and Projects, HSP/OEWG-H.2024/INF/5.

[15] OECD-DAC.

[16] OECD, Brick by Brick: Building Better Housing Policies, 2021; OECD, Restoring Public Finances 2026.

[17] OECD, Affordable Housing Database, indicator HM1.4, “Living Arrangements by Age Groups”, 2025; OECD, “Affordable Housing”, 2025 (homelessness); OECD, No Home for the Young?, 2021; National Association of Realtors, Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 2025.

[18] UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2026; HSP/OEWG-H.2025/INF/2, para. 28.

[19] World Bank / Global Platform for Sustainable Cities, Public-Private Partnerships for Investment and Delivery of Affordable Housing in Emerging Market Economies, Washington, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank, 2020.

[20] UN-Habitat, Proposed Recommendations on Housing Finance, HSP/OEWG-H.2025/INF/2, notably paras. 164–167; UN-Habitat, Revised Proposed Recommendations, HSP/OEWG-H.2025/6.

[21] UN-Habitat, World Cities Report 2026 (895 million in 2000; 1.13 billion in 2024); 2050 projection: HSP/OEWG-H.2025/INF/2, para. 26.

[22] Cities Alliance, Climate Finance for the Urban Poor: A Review of Global Climate Funds, 2024.

[23] United Nations General Assembly, Resolution A/RES/80/5 of 4 November 2025, Doha Political Declaration of the “World Social Summit” under the title “the Second World Summit for Social Development”.

Original text written in French translated by a.i.