Bridging the Humanitarian-Development Divide : Indonesian-Swedish Stakeholder Case Studies on LRRD

This thesis studies the concept of Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development (LRRD), a topic discussed since the late 1980’s that has failed to be practically implemented, partly because of widely divergent perspectives on the concept. The discourse on LRRD has so far largely been conducted in a top-down fashion with donors constituting the dominant interlocutor, while the perspectives of aid organisations and local communities involved in humanitarian and developmental programmes have been widely overlooked. This thesis thus means to bring clarity to how LRRD is conceptualised by different stakeholders through proposing a comprehensive conceptual framework based from literature, which is used to analyse empirical case studies at the local, national, and international levels. The case studies were conducted in Indonesia and Sweden through interviews with 16 participants and a survey with 20 beneficiaries as respondents. The participants included: beneficiaries at a tsunami post-disaster site, local community leaders, a local level NGO, two national level Indonesia NGOs (MDMC and YEU), and an INGO (Plan International).The research reveal that none of the cases experienced as rigid divide between humanitarian and development action as is often suggested in the literature discourse and through donor policies. All interviewed NGOs expressed that they operated in a way that does create strong humanitarian-developmental linkages and that the major obstacle to achieve this is external pressures, particularly from donor agencies, to operate under exclusively humanitarian or developmental imperatives