Making the Nexus Real: Moving from Policy to Practice

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Throughout the modern history of humanitarian and development assistance, there has been tension between efforts to address immediate needs and the root causes giving rise to those needs. Different funding streams, principles, programming tool kits, and specializations have evolved, leading to often competing communities of action. The space where these two types of assistance link or overlap has been called the nexus. This concept of the nexus is defined as:

"A way of working with populations affected by or at risk of crisis, to ensure the immediate needs of that population are met, while simultaneously promoting enduring solutions and addressing root causes that create continuing risk to lives, livelihoods, and security, and which builds in protection against all risks (natural, economic and political) as an integral goal."

The Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus approach proposed by the UN in 2016 and further elaborated by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/DAC) is the latest attempt to reconcile this tension within the formal international assistance community. It is one approach to promoting the nexus. Most actors now use the OEDC’s description of this approach to the nexus – the HDP Nexus:

"The aim of strengthening collaboration, coherence and complementarity. The approach seeks to capitalize on the comparative advantages of each pillar—to the extent of their relevance in the specific context—in order to reduce overall vulnerability and the number of unmet needs, strengthen risk management capacities and ad- dress root causes of conflict."

This report explores both the nexus (small n), as a way of programming, and the HDP Nexus approach (capital N) also called the Triple Nexus, as the approach promoted by the UN and OECD/DAC, to include necessary ways organizations must work together to be able to offer programming that achieves our desired impacts.

The HDP Nexus community of practice arose out of multiple other movements over the past 40 years, taking its current formal shape through several reports and summits in 2015/2016. It has been driven by major donor governments, the EU, and the UN. Although the US government is a signatory to the commitments that launched the nexus approach as a community of practice, USAID, including the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), has not been a major driver of this movement.

The HDP Nexus is built on previous learning. Each of a long list of agendas preceding the current HDP Nexus approach has added incremental learning that has accumulated. Resilience is the community of practice contributing the most to the HD Nexus approach with significant overlap in concepts of addressing long-term needs and root causes while also meeting immediate needs.

The HDP Nexus adds or increases stress on two components. Most obvious is the addition of the peace pillar. The other, more important component is significant stress on the coordination element. This paper therefore divides the discussion into programming and coordination.

Programming best practices using a nexus lens are not different from best practices already established. Those best practices emphasized by nexus thinking involve how a program interacts with a changing, fluid context, other actors, and other activities in that context, to include government service providers and other local actors. Contexts themselves shift between crises with opportunities for recovery, and stability with risks and vulnerabilities. A good nexus program requires a deep under- standing of the context, recognizing and responding to changes in that context, and the drivers of those changes. Therefore, program teams need systems and skills to monitor and analyze the context on a rolling basis, not just at baseline.

A lack of skills in conflict analysis is very often cited as a major barrier to programming in the HDP Nexus, as without a good understanding of the conflict dynamics the peace pillar becomes something of a black box. As a context shifts from stability to crisis or back, programs need both programmatic and financial mechanisms that permit flexibility to adjust the program accordingly. Responsiveness to changing contexts and needs requires skilled individuals who understand both humanitarian and development programming, even if only through an advisor within the country team. Lack of individuals present in-country with these skills are currently noted as a barrier, though this cadre is growing. Best practice in the nexus also means being aware of and adjusting programming to dovetail with other local programming or local government services, even those anchored in other pillars.

Well before the emergence of the HDP Nexus community of practice, the Do No Harm community of practice started the conversation of international aid’s complex relationship with conflict. “Do No Harm” is essentially providing assistance in a way that is conflict sensitive and does not exacerbate conflict. Where the opportunity arises, it aims to mitigate the conflict. In recent years, both the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Resilience communities of practice have begun to treat conflict as a major risk or driver of vulnerability that should be considered and addressed like any other risk or driver.

In a recent workshop hosted by Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance on evaluation of the application of the HDP Nexus in different organizations, multiple speakers stated that nexus programming itself is primarily following Resilience and DRR best practices already well established and accepted. Instead of focusing on how programs are designed, nexus evaluations described in the workshop focused almost exclusively on the organizational components of the nexus—how an organization had adjusted its own structure to facilitate programs that addressed root causes of vulnerability while meeting immediate needs, but even more, how organizations worked together to cover the multiple needs across the nexus. There was apparent consensus that no single program could, or was expected to, address all pillars simultaneously within a single crisis or context. Instead, the key to the HDP Nexus is orchestrating the efforts of multiple organizations working in various parts of the nexus—each flexing to the strengths and weaknesses of the other actors – to cover the full range of needs within a single context while simultaneously respecting their independence and varied motivations.

The major concepts inherent in the OECD’s interpretation of the HDP Nexus are coherence, collective outcomes, comparative advantage, collaboration and complementarity—all concepts meant to orchestrate the multiple actors within a context to achieve the greatest overall impact through a unified vision. While these concepts alone do not define the nexus, they provide guidance on how multiple actors should work together in a specific context to maximize the positive impact on a population or situation.

Coordination does not happen spontaneously and needs to happen at multiple levels. In the humanitarian realm, the cluster system coordinates daily activities, but coordination in this sense goes deeper to planning and prioritizing objectives. Currently there is no recognized platform or structure for coordinating actors’ priorities across the pillars, and actors report little incentive or requirement for actors across the pillars to operate on the platforms that currently do exist. Experience with humanitarian sectors and then the cluster system tells us coordination is a learning process requiring experimentation. Multiple sources suggest the country level is the easiest and potentially most appropriate level to learn to organize Nexus actors’ objectives, to include donors as well as international and local implementors, and local government line ministries where appropriate. There is a real cost to working within such a coordinated framework rather than independently; therefore, there must be an incentive to actors to participate. Donors are uniquely positioned to provide this incentive, whether through increasing capacity, reach, or impact. One potential approach for USAID to continue organizational learning about coordinating across the nexus might be an adapted version of the Strategic Advisory Group for Emergencies used in Ethiopia. This platform is internal to USAID but involves BHA and each of BHA’s sister bureaus at a context-specific scale. Such a platform would allow BHA to respond faster, more effectively, and more efficiently by providing access to real-time context monitoring during non-crisis times. It would give BHA the opportunity to influence development program designs to facilitate shifts to humanitarian responses and provide access to significant contextual information and networks of local actors to ramp up humanitarian responses.

Not all actors are happy to use the HDP Nexus approach as they understand it, citing several risks. There are concerns that encouraging actors to work outside of their specialty will reduce their effectiveness. In the current funding structure, funds are pillar-specific, which limits competition for that funding to actors in that pillar. Some see the nexus as more actors competing for limited funds, as actors outside a pillar can claim funding for work within multiple pillars. Over time, with the professionalization of humanitarian and development work, more and more demands are being made of implementing staff in-country. Some see the nexus as adding yet more onto their shoulders—that it isn’t enough to be an expert within their own pillar, now they need to be experts in all pillars.

The most serious concerns regarding the HDP Nexus approach are related to the overt inclusion of the peace pillar. Single-mandate humanitarian actors fear coherence across all pillars will subsume their work into a political agenda. They worry that humanitarian work will be inappropriately called upon to solve political problems, causing a loss of access to vulnerable populations when humanitarian principles are violated. Each of these concerns is valid, and each actor will need to determine where to place themselves within the nexus.

Most concerns are based on a misunderstanding of that flexibility or of the coordinating elements of the Nexus. There is a range of options, from the minimum of being sensitive to the needs and activities associated with other pillars, to active collaboration with actors in other pillars, to simultaneously and actively addressing issues in multiple pillars.

The influence of or stress on each of the three pillars varies by context. In many situations, the peace pillar may be a minor concern, and programming in the humanitarian and development pillars may simply need to be sensitive to do no harm. In other cases, for example South Sudan, peace needs to be a major consideration in all activities, both to prevent exacerbating conflict and to allow immediate needs to be met equitably. Different actors within the same context also find each of their roles will place them differently within the nexus. Perhaps one program is anchored in one pillar but addresses issues in other pillars. Another program may be focused almost entirely on one pillar while being sensitive to dynamics in other pillars. With the nexus, the approach moves from viewing programs individually to taking a whole-of-context approach. As such, coordination of the nexus needs to be at the context level, which is usually the country level but may be a sub-country regional level. Coordination then includes building consensus and a unified vision among the actors.

The HDP Nexus approach is not simply about programming; it is even more about the structure of assistance, how different actors and their contributions interact—to include funding structures. Barriers posed by pillar-specific funding is regularly cited as the most significant barrier to applying the nexus approach. Above all, implementors call for flexible, multiyear funding that allows them to adjust to changes in the context, for example to pivot from development to humanitarian assistance early in a crisis to prevent it from escalating. While previous communities of practice leading up to the HDP Nexus touched on the need for new funding structures, the nexus approach calls for (and donors have committed to) providing support that encourages rather than discourages addressing simultaneously both immediate needs and root causes, providing enduring solutions. Government donors will need to work creatively and collaboratively to live up to this commitment.

Several investments need to be made for the Nexus approach to be widely applied. These include: 1) a high-level platform to systematically collect and promote learning related to the nexus; 2) context-specific platforms in-country, with associated funding, to bring the relevant actors together into a single whole-of-context approach; and 3) access for implementers to new types of information and new skill sets, potentially provided through advisors with multi-pillar experience and advisors with strong conflict analysis skills.

This report identifies four major takeaway points:

1. The HDP Nexus approach has two major components: programming and coordination.

• On the programming side, the HDP Nexus increases stress on the “peace” element and its relationship to humanitarian and development efforts. Otherwise, most programming elements are already well developed within the DRR and Resilience communities of practice.
• The HDP Nexus requires orchestrating the various actors and their capacities (coherence, complementarity and collaboration), including the donors and their funding streams, to enable, encourage and facilitate implementing agencies to either individually address both immediate needs and drivers of need or to complement each other in such a way as to address both in a coherent manner.
  • This element is the most original concept that the HDP Nexus brings to the conversation and where it has the potential to have the most impact. It is an element that most government donors struggle with because funding most often comes to them already either earmarked to specific issues, or at the very least siloed into a single pillar, creating a major barrier for implementing agencies trying to work in the nexus.
  • If coherence becomes a responsibility of the donors or local governments, the fear of some implementers is that donor priorities will eventually subsume humantarian needs to meet a political agenda. Nevertheless, each context needs a central unifying vision (collective outcomes) driving the actors toward coherence and complementarity.

2. The HDP Nexus approach is a top-down movement, initiated and driven by OECD/DAC and UN. Resilience and DRR bodies of practice started more organically in the field and are working their way upward.

   • Due to a lack of experience and evidence applying the HDP Nexus concepts, there is very little guidance provided on what nexus programming best practices look like on the ground.
   • There is a strong body of evidence in resilience and DRR with practical experience that directly support the basic tenets of the programmatic parts of the HDP Nexus.
   • USAID has been a leader in Resilience programming. Any approach to the HDP Nexus should capitalize on that reputation, experience, and network to strengthen the multi- pillar nexus programming components.

3. Not all programs or actors need to address all pillars equally at all times.

   • Most of the confusion and push-back on the HDP Nexus involves confusion about how the different pillars interact, especially the peace pillar, and how actors are placed within the nexus in relation to the various pillars..
   • The appropriate emphasis of each pillar is context dependent.
   • In some contexts, the peace pillar may not be a major concern, but even in these instances, they must remain sensitive to their impact on peace.
   • A whole-of-context approach is necessary for coherent programming within that context.

4. Two types of platforms are needed to facilitate further development and implementation of HDP Nexus thinking.

• A high-level platform is general to the nexus community of practice to systematize development of nexus thinking. Smaller platforms are specific to each context to promote a whole-of-context approach.
• The fragmented discussion on how to apply the nexus approach is severely limiting its development and usefulness. The UN is promoting the approach before it has been fully explored even among its own agencies, causing confusion and uneven application. A system-wide platform is needed, with space for open discussion of risks associated with a nexus approach, constructive debate of best practices, and the systematic collection of evidence related to application of the nexus.
  • Context-specific platforms that engage all pillars are necessary for a coherent strategy. The difficulty is finding a balance of donor/UN/ implementor voice in the platform to ensure maximum buy-in.

BHA-specific recommendations include:

1. Capitalize on the Resilience learning throughout USAID.

• Resilience is the concept most closely related to the programming element of the HDP Nexus, and somewhat to the coordination element. Although outside of USAID, “resilience” is more closely associated with humanitarian work than development, it is now a widely accepted by both sides of the humanitarian development divide as a way of approaching programming for most technical sectors

2. Support whole-of-context nexus platforms, but do not dominate them.

• Highly participatory platforms, both system-wide and per context, are necessary to bring together the expertise of actors who often would rather ignore each other.
• These platforms need the support of donors but are best if not dominated by the donors or the big NGOs acting as donor proxies.
• The SAGE platform used in Ethiopia is more developed than others identified and may provide an example to build on. It has proven useful to BHA in the Tigray response.

3. Be creative about funding to promote the nexus programming.

• Inflexible funding and siloed funding streams were the barriers most often cited by implementing agencies trying to apply nexus thinking. Lack of comprehensive, flexible funding is blocking implementation of the HDP Nexus. This is exactly what the commitments of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit were meant to address, but government donors face internal structural barriers.
• Use the comparative advantages of the different donors (or bureaus within BHA), and together with implementors create a pooled fund and whole-of-context approach.