Attachments
Linking short-term humanitarian assistance with efforts that address the root causes of crisis or support longer-term well-being is far from a novel idea. But framing these issues as a ‘triple nexus’ of humanitarian-development-peace efforts and objectives, tackling core structural features of the international aid system, is a result of more recent aid system reform discussions, prompted by the World Humanitarian Summit and the ‘Leave No One Behind’ theme of the 2030 Agenda.
Since 2016, the HDP nexus discourse has brought a noticeable cultural shift in the humanitarian sector. The concept has gone in and out of fashion over the years, but through recent nexus work, the long-existing concepts of Linking Relief Recovery and Development (LRRD) and resilience have increasingly moved out of niche circles and into more mainstream, system-wide initiatives. This has sparked structural reforms in several agencies and prompted even more traditional humanitarian actors such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and development stakeholders such as the World Bank to engage in new partnerships that may have been unthinkable a decade ago. The nexus is back on the agenda, as a planned core theme for Grand Bargain 3.0. This is partly in response to aid recipients continuing to repeat their desire for aid that better enables self-sufficiency and resilience.
There have been promising legislative, policy and structural shifts among donors and operational agencies in line with elements of the HDP nexus.
Significant shifts in policy frameworks on the triple nexus – most notably the OECD-DAC recommendation – have marked a step forward in connecting humanitarians with approaches to longer-term risk and vulnerability. Some donors have embarked on significant structural changes to remove silos, both at HQ and country level. These include the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), who chose to undertake a major restructuring process, joining together its previously separate humanitarian aid and development cooperation departments to create geographical nexus teams from September 2022. Canada and Sweden used working groups for their nexus reforms, with Sweden using an iterative approach (OECD 2022) to build up cross-team engagement and support regional and country nexus collaboration.
While the nexus as a concept is widely endorsed, a lack of clear theories of change or objectives has created confusion over what the nexus means practically and operationally, making assessing progress a challenge (GB AIR 2023).
Two competing interpretations of the nexus as a change process are emerging: one that sees it as a transformative change requiring significant restructuring and wholesale changes to how the humanitarian-development-peace endeavours are conceived; a second that sees it as making more incremental modifications to existing ways of working, or even simply changing the label or reframing of existing practices (ALNAP 2023; OECD 2021). This has contributed to the overall sense that, despite isolated pilots, the nexus has not resulted in the wholesale transformation some feel is needed to achieve better support for people affected by conflict and fragility.