The Continuum of Humanitarian Crises Management: Multiple Approaches and the Challenge of Convergence

The notion that “relief alone is not enough” is common to all actors involved in the management of humanitarian crises. This notion was officially framed at the United Nations (UN) in 1991 as a “continuum from relief to rehabilitation and development,” and today remains a challenging task in the agenda of international assistance organizations. Despite periodic efforts to understand the problem and to put forward solutions, reviews report a lack of conceptual clarity and little progress. We 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 both humanitarian crises in general and crisis-specific settings. Thus, the present paper aims to contribute to advancing this conceptual front by comparing general approaches to the continuum of humanitarian crisis management, with those that can be found through the work on two emblematic types of crises: disaster risk reduction and peacebuilding. We show that parallel understandings of the continuum as a matter of actors and as a matter of phases coexist, and need disambiguation; besides there is difficulty internalizing the non-linearity of the process and a lack of clarity on the position of prevention within humanitarian crisis management. We put forward a multi-layered activities model as the most basic understanding of the continuum to which all actors can converge, and describe its strengths and weaknesses. Local ownership is the most important limiting factor, and pursuing approaches internal to or among foreign actors as an alternative to realizing the continuum is not a substitute.