Accompaniment is a recovery-support method in which outside actors support people through their own rebuilding process rather than replacing that process with a finished external solution [@pathways2022].

Within emergent disaster response, the term matters because it captures a practical difference between enabling agency and displacing it. In shelter self-recovery, accompaniment can include technical guidance, staged material support, and help navigating options without taking the recovery pathway out of affected people’s hands [@pathways2022].