In recent years, the humanitarian community has looked inward, learning from their past experiences in providing emergency shelter for the ever-increasing number of populations suffering from crises worldwide. The humanitarian reform process has helped widen the community of practitioners, reinforced global and country-based coordination systems, and required the agencies concerned to seek new and better means of ensuring integrated and robust humanitarian programming. This publication is an example of a series of learning tools being produced to support improved response to crises. It has been developed by the Emergency Shelter Cluster through a group of agencies within the cluster led by UN-HABITAT. It contains summaries of a range of experiences applied in crisis situations, and an honest appraisal of their successes and failures.