Mind the gap! UNHCR, humanitarian assistance and the development process

Anyone who has used London’s underground railway system will be familiar with the warning to “mind the gap” which is broadcast across the platform when passengers are preparing to board or alight from a train. The same phrase provides an apposite title for
a review of UNHCR’s efforts to link humanitarian assistance with the development process in less prosperous regions of the world. For the discourse on this issue has been dominated by references to the different gaps - institutional, financial and conceptual - that have obstructed the organization’s efforts in this domain over the past four decades.

This article provides a review of those efforts, looking initially at UNHCR’s involvement with the ‘refugee aid and development’ initiative of the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequently at the organization’s ‘returnee aid and development’ activities in the 1990s. The article concludes with some reflections on the ‘Brookings process’, UNHCR’s most recent attempt to address the elusive relationship between humanitarian assistance and the development process.