Contemporary students and scholars of development studies should be forgiven for feeling increasingly disillusioned. Global challenges relating to inequality, poverty and the climate crisis are multiplying and becoming more intractable. And yet, the established institutions of aid that many look towards to tackle these issues, such as government aid budgets, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multilateral agencies, have been subject to increasing and relentless critique. They have long been accused of inefficiency and ineffectiveness, paternalism, and mainly benefitting the Global North, further disenfranchising those in low-income countries and re-entrenching colonial hierarchies of knowledge and power. At the same time, through our own research, studying digital aid platforms in India, everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia and diaspora initiatives in Zimbabwe respectively, we gained glimpses into a multitude of other aid forms which fall outside the purview of development studies and its critics. They are only slowly being recognized in academic scholarship, let alone in development curricula. We have written this book to take these empirical insights and those of others seriously and to examine their significance for understandings, experiences and the practice of aid. Second, we aim to provide an answer to students, scholars and practitioners of international development when they ask, ‘what is the point of development studies?’, given that it appears to be such a flawed endeavour. Where should they put their efforts? We hope to achieve a radical widening and shifting of what is recognized as aid. This shift goes beyond the established institutions mentioned earlier and the critiques that have for so long been dominant in development discourse.