Governing equations often used in consolidation theories include Darcy’s law for flow and Terzaghi’s effective stress principle for deformation. It is known that the classical forms of these relations apply only to non-swelling, granular materials. Swelling clay soils require modifications to incorporate physico-chemical effects and intra-particle adsorbed water flow. In this paper we summarize recent generalizations of these results for swelling porous media which are obtained within the framework of “upscaling techniques”. The proposed approach consists of a three scale picture of swelling clays which incorporates physico-chemical effects and delayed adsorbed water flow during consolidation. At the microscale, the clay platelets and adsorbed water (water between the platelets) are considered as distinct nonoverlaying continua. At the intermediate (meso) scale the clay platelets and the adsorbed water are homogenized in the spirit of the hybrid mixture theory so that they may be thought of as two overlaying continua, each having a well defined mass density. By viewing the adsorbed water as a thin liquid film averaged over the clay particles, the disjoining or swelling pressure may be defined thermodynamically and shown to be consistent with experiments. This framework yields a rigorous derivation of some modified Terzaghi’s effective stress principles for clays which account for physico-chemical forces within and between clay particles. A homogenization procedure is used to upscale the mesoscale mixture of clay particles and bulk water (water next to the swelling mesoscale particles) to the macroscale. The resultant model is of dual porosity type where the clay particles act as sources/sinks to the macroscale bulk phase. A notable consequence of the approach developed herein is a macroscopic adsorbed-bulk water mass exchange which appears as a source term in the fluid mass balances. Based on our view of clay particles as a two phase system new directions for modeling consolidation of swelling clays are proposed.