"Beyond the Box: Rethinking the Nexus for a Changing World"
This is the seventh chapter in a forthcoming e-book, entitled 'The Triple Humanitarian, Development and Peace Nexus: In Context and Everyday Perspective', edited by Marina Ferrero Baselga and Rodrigo Mena. Chapters are being serialised on Global Policy over the coming months.
The HDP Nexus – it is both a blessing and a nightmare for the humanitarian community. On paper, the idea is compelling: more coordination, greater coherence, and collective efforts to achieve a common goal. In practice, however, it faces countless obstacles and evokes reactions ranging from amusement, skepticism, and frustration to outright resistance. The barriers to implementing the Nexus have been discussed exhaustively, with repeated emphasis on the challenges it poses, especially to principled humanitarian action in securitized frameworks.
This chapter will embark from the macro discourse level on the Nexus and instead focus on what the HDP Nexus looks like when we zoom in – more specifically what it demands from the organizational structures of international NGOs.
For many grassroots organizations embedded in the international aid framework, most Nexus policy debates feel disconnected from their day-to-day working realities. The neatly drawn boundaries between humanitarianism, development, and peace work—constructed by the international aid architecture—hold little relevance to their practical work. Their goal is not confined by such categories; they strive for peace, development, and the ability to support their communities when crises arise. To these organizations, the Nexus often seems more tied to the budgetary priorities of donor countries than to the core purpose of humanitarian action.
While securing and debating funding is undoubtedly critical—particularly multiyear, multipurpose, and flexible funding—it is by far the only issue even if the centrality of the topic might suggest otherwise To fulfill the potential of the HDP Nexus, discussions must move beyond financial frameworks and address the structural and organizational processes that allow the Nexus to function as an effective, people-centered approach. Global south actors repeatedly stress that the Nexus must be viewed as a means to achieve meaningful outcomes, rather than an end in itself, endlessly debated in Geneva, New York, and Berlin. It falls to policy advisors to identify the critical decisions that need to be made to operationalize this vision and ensure it translates into tangible impact.
That means also turning the attention away from the macro level of the international policy stage to own organizational structures. Humanitarian policy work isn’t just about negotiating humanitarian principles and access with authorities, donors, development agencies, or governments. The real challenge—and the real solution—lies further upstream in the humanitarian chain of command. It begins within: confronting one’s own organization, leadership, colleagues, and administration, and addressing entrenched structures that stifle progress and reform.
The HDP Nexus as a policy instrument is, at its core, donor-driven—designed to address the very problems created by the system it seeks to reform. But for meaningful Nexus implementation, we must go deeper. We must examine the disincentives and structural obstacles that hinder Nexus thinking and action within organizations themselves. To do so, I argue, we must open the conceptional HDP-Nexus box and take a look inside.
What’s in a Box?
Since its introduction into the aid policy field at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, the HDP Nexus has consumed significant energy—not for implementation, but for circumventing its conceptual “box.” Countless international conferences, high-level roundtables, and closed-door meetings have debated the Nexus at a meta level: discussing the shape, color, and texture of the metaphorical cardboard box labeled the Nexus. On the front stage of these events are polished performances and carefully worded commitments. In the audience, however, there are sighs, eye-rolling, frustration, and even open cynicism.
But what is the Nexus really about? To dismantle this conceptual box, we need to look inside. At its core, the Nexus is built around the “big Cs”: collective outcomes achieved through collaboration, coordination, coherence, complementarity, capacity, and conflict analysis.
The greatest obstacles to Nexus implementation often lie within aid organizations themselves. High staff turnover, poor knowledge management, evaluation systems geared solely toward donor accountability, internal silos and competition, and a lack of organizational clarity and coherence are just some of the issues. Worse still, many organizations suffer from uninspired, risk-averse, and visionless leadership.
These internal hindrances are both horizontal and vertical. Technical units, humanitarian departments, and development departments within the same organization often operate in silos, with few opportunities or incentives for collaboration and meaningful debate. The size, leadership, and internal capacity of an organization play a pivotal role, as does its ability to recognize and utilize the untapped potential of its staff.
Over the past decade, while the aid sector has invested heavily in building the capacity of local organizations under the localization agenda, it has lost sight of its own capacities. How often are employees’ skills—especially those that extend beyond their formal job descriptions and siloed frameworks—overlooked or dismissed by their own organizations?
Before focusing on the external barriers to interorganizational coordination—barriers often beyond the control of most humanitarian actors—we must first ask: are aid organizations themselves Nexus-ready? When do they truly engage in coordination? What types of information do they share, and what do they withhold—and why?
Beyond Proclamation
In an era marked by the decline of multilateralism, a worsening climate crisis, the resurgence of warfare, and shrinking aid budgets, it is imperative to focus on strengthening internal processes to effectively confront larger, systemic challenges. The humanitarian system must reimagine its role and restructure its processes to meet the demands of an increasingly complex world. The traditional growth model of the aid sector has become ineffective. To remain relevant, aid organizations must become more agile, flexible, resourceful, and innovative than ever before. They need to be adaptive and compatible to team up with other actors and sectors working towards the same or similar objectives, to become “Nexus-ready”.
The core elements of Nexus implementation—joint planning across sectoral divides, priority-setting frameworks, efficient context analysis and scenario planning, and improved information sharing—are only as effective as the decision-making processes that underpin them. Robust, integrated mechanisms are required to drive these processes, ensuring that even the most well-intentioned policies, strategies, and program instruments can deliver meaningful results.
Becoming Nexus-ready is not merely about external collaboration or alignment with donor priorities. It is about building the internal capacity to ask—and answer—the right questions: What are we trying to achieve? What is the purpose of our actions? Who do we need to work with to make it happen? How effectively do we take care for our staff and nuture the relationships to partners? What decision-making structures, processes, and leadership models do we need to support these efforts?
Ultimately, the Nexus is not about perfecting a conceptual box or ticking donor-mandated checkboxes. It is about working towards a system that incentivizes organizations to prioritize people and deliver real, measurable outcomes. This requires organizations to not only speak out and address external factors challenging their service delivery but also getting the work done, getting their own house in order by tackling the internal inertia that hinders progress, collaboration and coherence.
Humanitarian organizations of all shapes and sizes must finally stop debating the Nexus at arm’s length and instead commit to structural reform, reimagined leadership, and meaningful action. Only then can it truly deliver on the promise of collective outcomes for the communities it seeks to serve – and stay relevant in troublesome times.
Andrea Steinke is a Research Associate at the Centre for Humanitarian Action (CHA). She has been working and researching the dynamics and challenges of humanitarian aid for 15 years.
Photo by Artem Podrez
