'There has been a significant shift in thinking regarding the relationship between relief and development over the past decade. This has been driven by a number of factors, including an increased focus on linking aid and security'.
This paper considers in particular the role of social protection in the aftermath of war, in what are commonly referred to (sometimes misleadingly) as ‘post-conflict’ contexts.
This report, the third in HPG’s annual series looking at trends in the international humanitarian system, focuses on the increasing engagement of the international development aid system in situations which have traditionally been seen as the preserve of the humanitarian community.
This paper provides a broad overview of current programming approaches and ongoing debates relating to agricultural rehabilitation, focusing particularly on seeds and tools interventions, institutional capacity-building, and recent shifts towards market-, livelihoods- and rights-based approaches.
More and more governments, in Africa and elsewhere, have begun to buckle under the strains of economic crisis, structural adjustment and declining legitimacy, often resulting in the outbreak of civil war. International aid traditionally assumes the existence of states capable of making policy. In countries like Cambodia, Uganda or Kosovo, this is no longer the case. The big donor agencies usually respond by substituting emergency relief assistance for development aid. There are now calls to make relief more development-oriented in order to address the conflicts underlying crises. But the original research in this book demonstrates that relief and development aid are very distinct processes. Without public policy-making authorities, aid becomes highly fragmented, often inadequate in scale and incapable of building local sustainability for particular programmes. The international aid system, the author concludes, faces real dilemmas and remains ill-equipped to respond to the peculiar challenges of quasi-statehood that characterise chronic political emergencies and their aftermath.
Since most protracted crises are characterised by violent insecurity and either weak or abusive state institutions, humanitarian engagement increasingly takes place alongside other modes of engagement (security, state-building, development). How to configure these together constitutes an issue of concern to ODI as a whole. Issues of principle combine with questions about ‘what works' in different kinds of context, though generalisation is dangerous.
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