ABSTRACT
The notion ‘relief alone is not enough,’ officially framed at the United Nations in 1991 as a ‘continuum from relief to rehabilitation and development,’ still remains a challenging task in the agenda of all actors involved in the management of humanitarian crises. The authors suggest that one of the reasons for this is the paucity of efforts to clarify the meaning of the continuum in a way that leads to an understanding of humanitarian crises in general and crisis-specific settings. This chapter compares general approaches to the continuum of humanitarian crisis management, mainly ‘Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development,’ ‘Relief to Development,’ ‘Seamless Assistance,’ ‘Early Recovery,’ and ‘Resilience.’ It describes parallel understandings of the continuum as a matter of actors and as a matter of phases, and also underscores the importance of funding. The chapter then advances a multi-layered activities model as the most basic, common understanding of the continuum; such model addresses two major challenges: internalizing the non-linearity of the process in the conception of crisis management, and build in prevention as part of it. Finally, a list of issues and limitations of the model is included, all of which are explored through the empirical work in the subsequent chapters.
