Searching for the Nexus: Give Peace a Chance
This series from The New Humanitarian features special reports and opinion pieces related to theorizing and implementing the HDP Nexus.
This series of special reports and opinion pieces was featured in The New Humanitarian between 2019 and 2020. It covers a breadth of topics related to the HDP nexus including theories, funding mechanisms and implementation.
Special Reports
Searching for the Nexus: It's All About the Money
Current funding methods entrench “development” and “humanitarian” silos, planned and spent separately, typically through different agencies and channels. Since the nexus began gathering steam at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, there has been a rash of high-level commitments to change this approach.
However, a series of interviews with experts and aid workers – as well as studies consulted in the course of compiling this special report – suggest donors remain too risk-averse to put their money where their mouth is.
Key Points:
- Donors are rethinking at least $60 billion in annual aid spending.
- Joining up development, humanitarian, and peace spending should have more impact in the long run.
- Some examples of the new nexus approach are already underway, involving hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Donors have to reorganize themselves to implement the nexus.
- Aid agencies also need to redesign their proposals to donors to move beyond short-term programming.
- So far, the rhetoric is well ahead of reality as risk looms large.
Searching for the Nexus: Priorities, Principles and Politics
People receiving emergency aid want opportunities, not endless hand-outs. Aid donors don’t want to keep paying for the same repetitive short-term projects. And failing to address the root causes of local tensions only invites more conflict.
Those statements – at the heart of the triple nexus approach to delivering aid – are rarely disputed. It's everything else about uniting humanitarian, development, and peace-building efforts that's up for (often heated) discussion.
Who's in charge when these efforts are combined? Should emergency aid look beyond the crisis to build resiliency? What role should governments play? And why do relief workers need to care about the Sustainable Development Goals?
This special report examines some of the most pressing questions at the center of aid's new meta-policy, drawn from interviews over a series of months with dozens of policymakers, aid workers, donors, academics, and others.
Searching for the Nexus: The View From the Ground
Far from the air-conditioned meeting rooms of Geneva and New York, it is frontline aid workers who are wrestling with the practical challenges of making the triple nexus – the push to coordinate humanitarian, development and peace-building efforts – a reality. Billions of dollars and millions of lives could be at stake.
But three years after the idea took shape at the World Humanitarian Summit, it is still early days for nexus-focused programming. And with limited independent monitoring so far, it’s hard to get a clear picture of what has really changed – for better or worse.
According to dozens of aid workers, policy officials, donors, and academics interviewed by The New Humanitarian over several months, three things are clear: the nexus is easy to say, harder to deliver, and surprisingly controversial.
The feature also includes two opinion pieces, "Searching for the Nexus: Why We're Looking in the Wrong Place" by Marc DuBois and "Searching for the Nexus: How to Turn Theory Into Practice" by Hugo Slim.