Rethinking the Case for Linking Relief, Rehabilitation, and Development
How LRRD can become a practically useful concept for assistance in difficult places
Policymakers and aid actors have been grappling for decades with questions of how to better support vulnerable people affected by protracted or recurrent crises, and how to create a more seamless fit between short-term life-saving interventions and long-term efforts to reduce chronic poverty or vulnerability. The idea of linking relief and development, and later ‘linking relief, rehabilitation and development' (LRRD), seems intuitively simple, but there has been much debate about how it should be defined conceptually, how to put it into practice and the implications this has for the aid architecture.
With the current shift of attention towards ‘resilience', there has however been renewed interest in the concept of LRRD. This paper has been commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to look at the challenges to the practical implementation of LRRD, the extent to which these challenges have been overcome and how the concept could be most usefully employed today.
This paper finds that the practical uptake and impact of the ideas contained in LRRD could be transformed if it were no longer thought of as linking different kinds of aid, but rather as providing support holistically across a wide spectrum of circumstances and needs.