The research, led by David Lefutso of the Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa at the University of the Free State, together with colleagues at the University of Johannesburg, examines South Africa’s Programme on Rectification of Pre-1994 Residential Properties, a state-funded housing initiative embedded in the National Housing Code. From this program the team reverse-engineered what they call a Risk-Governed Housing Remediation Framework, an analytically abstracted model that integrates risk appraisal, multi-level institutional coordination, engineering standards, occupational health safeguards, procurement design, fiscal oversight, regulatory convergence, and community participation into a single operational system. Their central claim is striking: the danger lies not in a lack of rules, but in the absence of an implementation architecture that synchronizes the rules that already exist.

The scientific case for urgency is well established. Asbestos refers to a group of naturally occurring silicate fibers prized historically for their durability, heat resistance, and insulating properties. When disturbed, these materials release fibers that cause mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis, and the World Health Organization maintains that there is no known safe threshold for human exposure. Because disease latency can span decades, the authors describe legacy asbestos as a slow-onset disaster: a hazard whose outcomes depend less on uncertainty about the science than on government action and capacity. Exposure persists most acutely during maintenance, renovation, removal, and waste handling, precisely the activities that dominate life in ageing, low-income housing stock.

South Africa carries a particularly heavy burden. The country was once a major producer and consumer of asbestos, and its townships and state-financed homes are dotted with asbestos-cement roofs and cladding that have deteriorated over decades. Studies of township housing have documented environmental and domestic exposure routes around houses with asbestos-cement roofs, and community-level research across low- and middle-income countries confirms that routine disturbance and informal disposal practices create continuous household exposure pathways. National abatement regulations, including the Asbestos Abatement Regulations of 2020, require identification of asbestos in place, inventories, risk assessments, and management plans, but the study finds that such tools alone do not generate the institutional capacity, budgets, and coordination needed for area-wide remediation in occupied neighborhoods.

The framework’s first component treats risk-based targeting as a genuine governance mechanism rather than a routine diagnostic step. Condition surveys, hazard identification, and professional engineering judgement become decision points that determine whether asbestos-containing materials should be removed, encapsulated, or otherwise managed. This matters because poorly planned removal can itself spread fibers, particularly where sheets are weathered, damaged, or informally altered in densely occupied environments. By making professional assessment a precondition for funding and implementation, the framework formalizes technical judgement as a filter, ensuring that the choice between removal and containment is justified by exposure likelihood, material condition, technical feasibility, and the capacity to prevent secondary exposure during the work.

The second and third components address institutional fragmentation and engineering quality. Asbestos remediation sits at the intersection of environmental regulation, labor control, housing delivery, building standards, and municipal enforcement, mandates that in many countries operate in parallel silos. The South African design links national policy custodianship, provincial implementation authority, municipal enforcement, and independent professional oversight into one operational chain, while approved inspection authorities, professional engineers, contractors, and occupational health actors share responsibility for inspection, certification, and verification. This layered accountability reduces the risk that a single authority commissions, implements, and certifies the safety of its own work. Engineering specifications for wall construction, roof sheeting, fixing methods, and enrollment with the National Home Builders Registration Council are treated as upstream governance criteria that shape funding approval and quality assurance, aligning hazardous material removal with broader housing improvement in line with the Sendai Framework’s emphasis on reducing existing risk through safer construction.

Occupational health receives equally systematic treatment. The framework positions worker safety not as a narrow compliance requirement but as a system for preventing risk displacement, a critical concern when removal occurs near households, schools, and pedestrian routes. Requirements for risk assessment, safety planning, personal protective equipment, decontamination, air monitoring, medical surveillance, and long-term exposure records are directly linked to community protection and post-work clearance. The study is explicit that remediation does not automatically reduce risk the moment work begins: badly governed removal can create new exposure pathways for workers, residents, and surrounding communities, so worker and household protection are framed as mutually reinforcing obligations rather than separate ones.

Two of the framework’s most distinctive components concern money and justice. Procurement is used as an instrument of environmental justice: contractor eligibility, competitive bidding, and a mandated 35 percent participation rate for micro, small and medium enterprises link remediation to local economic inclusion, so that communities bearing disproportionate environmental risk also benefit from the public investment flowing into their neighborhoods. Fiscal governance is treated as a safeguard in its own right. A Funding Resources Test and a Value-for-Money Test act as gatekeeping mechanisms, ensuring that large-scale remediation does not quietly cannibalize budgets committed to new housing and infrastructure. The authors argue that fiscal control is part of the governance of justice, because poorly designed remediation can unintentionally divert resources from other vulnerable households.

The final component embeds social vulnerability and community participation into the safety architecture itself. Written consent, temporary relocation where needed, consumer education, communication planning, grievance channels, and Community Liaison Officers recognize that remediation happens in domestic settings, not controlled industrial environments. A technically sound intervention, the study argues, can fail if residents fear the process, distrust implementers, or are excluded from decisions affecting their homes. Trust, cooperation, and local knowledge determine whether remediation proceeds without resistance, misunderstanding, or secondary exposure, making participation a condition for safe implementation rather than a courtesy.

The authors are careful about the limits of their contribution. The analysis is a policy design study, not an evaluation of implementation performance, exposure reduction, or cost-effectiveness, and it draws on document analysis and a structured literature review rather than interviews with households, officials, or contractors. The framework is grounded in South Africa’s institutional context, and its transferability depends on local regulatory, fiscal, and governance conditions. Even so, its implications reach well beyond asbestos. The same governance logic applies to lead-based paint, contaminated soils, unsafe roofing materials, and radon, slow-onset hazards embedded in the built environments of vulnerable communities worldwide. The study’s enduring message is that prohibition was never the finish line: until legacy hazards are eradicated or safely managed, the decisive question is whether governance systems can remove them safely, fairly, and sustainably, one roof at a time.

Subject of Research: Governance frameworks for legacy asbestos remediation in low-income housing

Article Title: From Prohibition to Protection: A Governance Framework for Asbestos Remediation in Vulnerable Settlements

Article References: Lefutso, D., Ogundeji, A. A., Nyam, Y. S., & Buthelezi, N. B. C. (2026). From Prohibition to Protection: A Governance Framework for Asbestos Remediation in Vulnerable Settlements. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-026-00767-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13753-026-00767-1

Keywords: asbestos remediation, risk governance, disaster risk governance, environmental justice, low-income housing, South Africa, occupational health, mesothelioma, housing policy, slow-onset disaster, procurement, community participation

The foundation for the final report was laid earlier, when the first phase of the Pathways study was released in April 2026. That phase established, through hundreds of surveys, that 98 percent of unhoused participants wanted permanent housing, a figure that directly counters persistent public narratives suggesting that many people experiencing homelessness prefer to remain unsheltered. The second phase deepened that quantitative picture by pairing it with qualitative evidence. Researchers interviewed participants about the full arc of their experiences, from the circumstances that preceded housing loss to the slow, often contradictory process of engaging with homeless services. By combining statistical breadth with narrative depth, the study aimed to capture not just how many people are affected but how the pathway into and out of homelessness actually unfolds over time.

A distinctive methodological feature of the research was its co-design with the Transformational Research for Equity and Experience in Shelter committee, a group composed entirely of people with lived experience of homelessness. Rather than treating formerly and currently unhoused individuals as passive subjects, the research team positioned them as analytic partners capable of interpreting patterns in the data. One study participant captured the rationale plainly, noting that people with lived experience are often invited to share stories, but that their capacity to analyze those experiences matters just as much, because they understand the patterns rather than merely witnessing them. This participatory approach gave the report an insider’s view of how housing service systems are experienced from below, including the emotional and cognitive labor that participants expend simply trying to remain eligible for help.

Lead investigator Kathleen Conte, an assistant professor in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, summarized the core insight of the findings by explaining that navigating homelessness involves far more than locating a service and accepting it. People, she said, are simultaneously trying to stay safe, meet basic needs, decipher a complicated service system, prove they qualify for assistance, maintain important relationships, advocate for themselves and push forward through long waits and repeated setbacks. The report frames this as a continuous balancing act in which the demands of survival compete directly with the demands of bureaucratic engagement. Missing a call, losing a document or changing shelter locations can unravel weeks of progress, meaning that the population most burdened by the system is also the one asked to perform the most sustained administrative effort within it.

The journey mapping revealed that for many participants, outright homelessness was preceded by a period of hidden homelessness, including couch surfing, living in vehicles and temporary hotel stays. These precursors are largely invisible in official counts, which means the visible crisis often represents a late stage of a much longer decline. Bereavement emerged as a strikingly common trigger: more than 30 percent of interview participants reported that the death of a loved one directly or indirectly contributed to their housing loss. The finding underscores how fragile housing stability can be when household finances and social support depend on a single person’s income or presence, and it suggests that grief and loss deserve greater attention in prevention-oriented policy, which typically focuses on eviction, rent burdens and employment disruption.

Once unhoused, participants described becoming trapped in what the report calls “the churn,” a state in which continuous effort to secure housing is repeatedly frustrated by systemic bottlenecks. These include missing identification documents that are difficult to replace without a fixed address, high turnover among case managers that forces people to retell their histories again and again, and phone calls that simply go unreturned. One participant delivered a pointed assessment of the current service framework, describing it as a system that rewards maintenance rather than transformation. The phrase captures a structural critique: programs are often organized around keeping people engaged and documented rather than around moving them decisively into permanent housing, which can leave individuals indefinitely cycling through shelter beds, waitlists and intake appointments.

Administrative requirements and rigid program thresholds compounded the problem, creating what the researchers describe as a painful mismatch between a person’s immediate needs and the assistance actually available. Participants recounted being denied services because their situations did not fit precise priority definitions, leaving them to navigate fragmented systems without clear guidance about where to turn next. Lori Kelley, planning and evaluation manager for the Multnomah County Homeless Service Department, which supported the study, emphasized that effective policy must be grounded in reality and that the county’s goal was to center the real-world experiences of people using services throughout the entire research process. She described the research as giving policymakers and the public an honest look at what works, what does not and what truly prevents people from reaching their housing goals.

Importantly, the report does not conclude that escape from homelessness is impossible. Participants also described moments when the system worked, when the right support, relationships and opportunities converged at precisely the right time to move them toward housing. Yet the study found that these successes were more often experienced as lucky breaks than as reliable pathways, a distinction with significant policy implications. When exits from homelessness depend on fortunate timing rather than predictable system design, outcomes become inequitable and difficult to scale. The TREES committee pressed this point in its own contribution to the report, stressing that while numbers, charts and data are incredibly important, remembering the humans living without housing, and what those numbers represent, should be the priority guiding interpretation and action.

Based on the combined evidence, the report sets out six core priorities for action, developed in collaboration with the TREES committee. These include expanding diverse affordable housing models tailored to different ages, family structures, disabilities and safety needs; prioritizing prevention and housing stability through flexible early financial support and livable-wage employment before housing is lost; coordinating and standardizing services with centralized information points to reduce administrative runaround; eliminating practices such as involuntary displacements that strip people of belongings, legal documents and case manager relationships; strengthening community support systems through peer networks and culturally specific organizations; and integrating lived experience directly into funding decisions, program design, policy and research. Conte cautioned that no single organization can build the path alone, noting that people in crisis are asked to navigate housing, health care and other systems that do not always connect. If better pathways out of homelessness are the goal, she argued, those systems must work together rather than expecting people to find their own way without a map.

Subject of Research: A lived-experience study of the pathways people take through homelessness and homeless services in Multnomah County, Oregon.

Article Title: New PSU study maps complex journeys through homelessness in final pathways report

Article References: New PSU study maps complex journeys through homelessness in final pathways report. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: homelessness, Portland State University, Multnomah County, housing policy, lived experience, social services, public health, housing instability, poverty, homeless services, prevention, participatory research