The activities carried out by UN-HABITAT can be categorized as normative and technical cooperation activities. Normative activities focus on helping countries implement the Habitat Agenda by enhancing their capacities through training programmes, helping them to improve their policies and legislation in key areas relating to human settlements, promoting good urban management governance, and providing current information and research on global trends in urban and human settlements.

Regional and technical cooperation activities, on the other hand, put into practice the policies and strategies identified by the normative programmes. They provide operational assistance, demonstrate that the concepts and policies are workable, and establish a knowledge base of best practices and lessons learnt. Increasingly, these projects are being designed with a view to prepare for follow-up investment to scale them to macro level to achieve sustainable impact.

This combination of normative and operation activities enables UN-HABITAT to offer countries a combined package of technical assistance, capacity building and advisory services.

In 2008, UN-HABITAT received General Purpose contributions and special purpose funding of USD 134.2 million. Of the Special Purpose funds received, USD 45.5 million was for normative activities and USD 88.7 for technical cooperation activities.