The world becomes increasingly urban, housing poverty in the global south has made the metaphor ‘planet of slums’ a global reality. This paper revisits the dichotomy of enabler vs. provider debate in housing policy that preoccupied housing scholars in the last few decades. Drawing on the government intervention in Brazil and India, it is argued that the transformative and adaptive capacity of enabling strategy has now come of age. Among other things, the paper makes a close reading of the historical and geographical (re)constitution of the process of housing delivery in these countries and argues that they have adopted enabling strategies along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis management and show a clear predisposition towards earlier provider approach of state-administered, large-scale housing programs to support low-income households. Thus, as one policy approach follows another, the discursive space for the government policy doctrine acquires a layered structure, which contains elements of both provider and enabling approaches. Whilst these developments, still evolutionary, challenges remain in the form of conceptual contradictions that continue to obscure our approach towards low-income housing policies in the global South.

Arguably on this basis, considerably more, attention should be given to providing housing to the poor in the global South. The enabling strategy is to create enabling housing regimes that allow markets to produce housing for all with low-income people and the state taking the back seat to manage the institutional, legislative and regulatory environment. The support of the World Bank in this regard is much appreciated with ‘Enabling Housing to Work’ (1993) and supporting the housing sector and managed as part of the overall economy. The philosophy of it the government should withdraw from direct production of housing or give out subsidies of any form for housing. The strategy was also reinforced by Agenda 21 and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were subsumed into 2030.