This review of the effectiveness of different approaches to refugee settlement shows that the ‘traditional’ approach of setting up refugee camps is ineffective in many respects – particularly in terms of promoting self-reliance – and hence to be avoided. The recommendation in policy circles is now for alternatives to camps that provide economic opportunities to refugees, allow mixing with host populations, do not set up parallel service delivery systems, and seek to benefit both refugees and host communities. However, perhaps because the policy shift away from camps is only recent, there is less clarity about what these alternatives would look like in practice and very few large-scale examples of this.