Is the humanitarian-development nexus still working?

Seven years ago at the United Nations’ World Humanitarian Summit, the development and humanitarian communities agreed on a “new way of working” that would more seamlessly integrate the two sectors when operating in the same places. While it began as a good idea aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing costs, the framework has failed to deliver in an era with more humanitarian disasters seemingly by the month. Protracted crises have increasingly blurred the line between urgent humanitarian and longer-term development work as organizations with different mandates attempt to work together on a host of overlapping challenges amid an ever-tightening funding landscape. Known as the “humanitarian-development nexus,” the framework is defined by the U.N. Office of Humanitarian Affairs as “working towards achieving collective outcomes that reduce need, risk and vulnerability, over multiple years, based on the comparative advantage of a diverse range of actors.” “At the time I really expected … it would trigger a discussion among the entire system” about working more closely together, said Andreas Schuetz, section chief of the Humanitarian-Development Collaboration Section at OCHA, who was involved with the drafting of the nexus concept at the 2016 meeting. “We will always alleviate humanitarian suffering and try and provide humanitarian assistance, but we also felt like we really wanted to push development actors further to engage in addressing underlying drivers of need.” “We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can address humanitarian crises and we can focus in on prevention. If we cannot, then understand violent conflict and fragility will continue to increase.” --— Elizabeth Hume, executive director, Alliance for Peacebuilding Humanitarian organizations do emergency response to alleviate immediate humanitarian suffering, such as providing food after a war or a natural disaster. Development organizations focus on helping people improve their lives over the long term, such as providing farmers with knowledge and tools so they can sustainably grow more on their land. This has become more difficult, but more necessary: Residual effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing climate change impacts on vulnerable communities, natural disasters, war and conflicts in Ukraine and around the world, a food affordability crisis, and a global economic downturn have pulled resources in so many directions that a cohesive approach to fixing them all at once remains elusive. Increasingly scarce financing and growing competition in international aid have also challenged the goal of working better together as organizations must watch out for their bottom line in addition to the outcomes of their programs. More alignment needed The nexus wasn’t an entirely new idea when it was adopted as part of the U.N. commitments coming out of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. It was a repackaging of a previous concept — “relief to development” — that captured the same desire to see better collaboration between humanitarian and development groups. But despite this hardly being the first go-round at improved coordination, progress toward operationalizing the nexus in the field remains disappointing, Schuetz said. An OCHA analysis of the nexus approach in Afghanistan published in 2021 found a host of reasons for the lack of progress: Humanitarian and development groups have varying risk tolerance levels, different organizations have competing priorities that lead them to minimize focus on nexus implementation, and there is a lack of funding mechanisms specifically for nexus activities. Action has also failed to move beyond “aligning and coordinating planning frameworks rather than on joined-up programming.” A similar analysis conducted in Somalia found that “there is continued risk aversion towards more sustainable programming in volatile contexts.” Even as donors recognize they should support longer-term development programming with innovative approaches, they remain risk-averse and seek predictions that aren’t possible in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. “I would like to still see more speed and engagement and more alignment,” Schuetz said. “If we really want to have a step change at country level, we still need to come stronger together and coordinate with each other. I’m not speaking about the U.N. solely, I really speak about the variety of donors and actors who are also providing development assistance.” OCHA never intended to “blur the lines” between the humanitarian and development sectors and their respective mandates and principles by using the nexus framework, Schuetz said, but this blurring remains at the heart of the difficulties around making the nexus a reality: How do you work together flawlessly yet maintain strict boundaries between development organizations and humanitarian organizations? One of the biggest challenges is to “ensure a common understanding of what the nexus means,” Schuetz said, given the number of groups that need to be on the same page. OCHA held workshops with country teams to determine the best way to implement the framework for each context. One of the initial concerns Schuetz heard was budgetary, he said. Some implementing organizations had been concerned that their funding could be affected by the approach, influencing their ability to raise financing as money was spread ever more thinly, he said. International aid budgets have not risen with the urgency the world’s current crises demand. OCHA appealed for a record $51.5 billion for 2023, for example, but donors have not spent in kind. Many Western countries on the verge of recession have restricted funding for aid, creating more fierce competition between development and humanitarian needs. And some countries are using accounting tricks to spend more of their development budgets at home. A recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development analysis shows that the largest providers of aid increased domestic spending on refugees by a staggering 242% from 2010 to 2021. No shift in funding OCHA head Martin Griffiths sees a deep connection between development and humanitarian work. “We should be arguing for climate money, not necessarily to go to us and certainly not to go to us first, but to go to others, because if there aren't those investments in resilience and alternative livelihoods, you will never see the back of the humanitarian efforts,” Griffiths said last year. “We're gonna be there every year.” Amanda Rives, senior director of external engagement and resource development at World Vision, said her organization is grappling with “how much of a humanitarian organization” does it become over the long term. World Vision is a “dual mandate” organization, meaning it does both humanitarian and development work. She said that many of their peer NGOs, which used to spend about 20-25% of their field budgets on acute humanitarian disaster responses, are now spending as much as 50%. “You’re suddenly forced to be doing life-saving humanitarian assistance in 28 countries at the same time. And you don’t see an equivalent shift of global funding to that, and you never will,” Rives said. The traditional funding structures of the two sectors play into the difficulty of seamless planning at the nexus, Schuetz said. Humanitarian funding is often channeled through the U.N. system, which has a robust global presence that makes it easier to coordinate among many entities. Development funding, however, is more often given bilaterally, meaning it can be disconnected from a central system and agenda. In South Sudan, the vast majority of donor funding is for humanitarian activities, according to Walter Chengo, World Vision International disaster management team director for resources development. This makes it incredibly difficult for the organization to finance programs that seek to incorporate development, in addition to another problem: Communities themselves are also often not interested in programs focused on resilience building, he said, because they’ve been receiving humanitarian help for so long. “People are stuck in a mindset where they are expecting to get free things. And when you try to move them to a situation where they can do things [on] their own, it is a struggle,” Chengo said. It’s also a matter of having the right staffing, he said, noting that most World Vision employees in South Sudan are humanitarians and do not have the program expertise to design and execute development activities. Without obvious sources of funding, it isn’t practical for the organization to bring in development experts. This prevents World Vision from “layering” programs in an effective way, so humanitarian activities would seamlessly overlap with development ones to move communities to “self-reliance,” he said. A ‘loss of focus’ OCHA’s resident coordinator structure, “reinvigorated” in 2018, aimed to bring about more coordination between U.N. country teams, but those networks still don’t encompass all organizations working in a particular place. Schuetz said that the nexus has been most successful in places with strong leadership from the resident coordinator and buy-in from the government. Oxfam, which also has a dual mandate, “likes the nexus idea” and has made it a “deliberate focus” over the past five years, said Daryl Grisgraber, who leads the humanitarian policy department. “It’s a tough one because for us as much as we talk about what we need to do to make the nexus work and how we need to plan and what kind of interaction we need internally, it remains difficult to implement it because of course [development and humanitarian] funding streams have not been adequately integrated,” Grisgraber said. Two Oxfam programs in Chad and the Central African Republic were rare exceptions, according to Amelie Gauthier-Campbell, humanitarian and conflict influencing lead for Intermón Oxfam, the organization’s Spanish affiliate. Flexible trust funds that could be used over a three to five-year period allowed an appetite for risk and innovation because they weren’t constrained to a typical one-year project cycle, she said. Part of the reason the nexus approach has failed is the pressure for all organizations to work on growing themes — such as climate — which has resulted in a “loss of focus,” said Jacob Kurtzer, a senior at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Humanitarian Agenda. The need to shoehorn nexus work into existing operations can also create undue barriers for organizations, even as the point is to make things easier, he said. Kurtzer has heard complaints from humanitarian organizations which are opposed to having to prioritize nexus work, even as their own operational mandates expand beyond traditional humanitarian response to include things such as climate change and education. “We’ve sat in private roundtable meetings … where humanitarians are complaining and complaining,” Kurtzer said. “But I’m like ‘your own organization does both humanitarian and development work,’ so it’s hard for me … to hear this argument from you as an organization of this concept.” In some contexts, the framework is also expanded to include peace, creating the unwieldy “humanitarian-development-peace nexus” — sometimes shortened to “the triple nexus” — that can mean different things to different people tasked with putting it into practice. Integrating the three is the central objective of the Global Fragility Act, a 2019 law that calls for an overhauling of the way the United States engages in fragile countries. “What we’re doing is not working,” said Elizabeth Hume, executive director of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. But, that doesn’t mean change isn’t possible, noting that just because it isn’t currently being done doesn’t mean the system can’t do it. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can address humanitarian crises and we can focus in on prevention. If we cannot, then understand violent conflict and fragility will continue to increase,” Hume said. Hume, a former senior conflict advisor with USAID, said it was “not a public secret” that humanitarian and development work is siloed within the agency. “It’s why under the GFA we talk about things that have to change,” she said. “If it was easy, somebody would have done it before. It would have gotten done.” Conflict can easily undo any progress made in shifting to development, Chengo said. In South Sudan, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve success with things such as agricultural resilience programs because people get displaced off their land. If and when they can eventually return, programs must start from scratch. Getting donors on board There can be a conflict between humanitarian principles — which Kurtzer described as “do as much as you can, right now” — and development work, which is inherently concerned with the future. He said it would be “wise” for donors to consider how any nexus-related mandates affect work in the field, which can “complicate matters for organizations on the ground if it’s pushed too heavily.” Oxfam sees part of the problem as a lack of interest from donors, not a mandate to overprescribe nexus work, Grisgraber said. “If the money were coming through and donors were more on board with the nexus — I think in particular the amount of planning it takes and the amount of predictable funding it takes — we’d find ways to make it work out,” Grisgraber said. “The U.N. got very serious about this ‘new way of working,’ and I think that was the moment which humanitarians really thought … there was some real change coming up here, and it kind of didn’t happen.”