Today there are much more exciting terms to focus on than *sustainability; a word that over recent decades has emerged from the global environmental, economic and social crises and is currently in the spotlight of many project proposals as a sort of “promise for a better world”. Despite the wisdom that sustainability aims to introduce in governance policies, it has become as emptied as any other concept able to open the pockets of funders, particularly in difficult contexts such as Palestine, where any initiative is easily deviated toward a humanitarian discourse.

In this publication, we approached sustainability as a “strategy of maintenance”, present in any dimension of daily life in Palestinian refugee camps, from the simplest personal experience to the complexity of community relations.