There is much talk of the ‘relief to development’ continuum in the aid world, and about the need to create clusters of agencies to work together in providing more coherent responses to the needs of populations. However, there are underlying tensions associated with relief and development which continually arise, not least because relief is shaped by an ideology, humanitarianism, which, in essence, requires development to fail. Humanitarianism is a powerful, pervasive and resilient set of ideas associated with saving strangers. Read more about Humanitarianism