Annual Impact and Learning Review: The Humanitarian - Development Nexus

The idea of a “humanitarian-development nexus” is not new. For many years there have been discussions about how to better integrate humanitarian and development work. But in recent years – with conflict more protracted, climate-related issues intensifying, persistent inequality (including gender inequality), rapid urbanisation, political and economic instabilities – the need to address underlying causes alongside immediate needs has never been more compelling.

Momentum on the nexus agenda in the last few years started in the run up to the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in 2016. Under the WHS’s core commitment (“Changing people’s lives: from delivering aid to ending need”) humanitarians committed to a “new way of working” (NWOW) which entails transcending the humanitarian development divide and shifting from a focus on supplying humanitarian assistance to those who need it, to reducing the demand for humanitarian assistance by addressing root causes. The NWOW was later summarised in the commitment to action signed at the WHS by the former-Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and eight UN principals and endorsed by the World Bank and International Organization for Migration (IOM). It focuses on removing unnecessary barriers to humanitarian-development collaboration and highlights the importance of the context, stating that, “where allowed and without undermining humanitarian principles, NWOW can contribute to collective outcomes.” This was subsequently taken further in several processes and initiatives at the global level including UN reform, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework and the World Bank’s involvement in the peace and development arena. Given such high-level commitments the nexus concept is highly likely to be implemented.

The paper sets out three key points on nexus:

1. CARE believes that humanitarian, development and peace work, and in particular the structures and processes that govern it at the global level, should be complementary but not merged.
2. While humanitarian and development work must support an environment conducive to peace, they must not be instrumentalised to this end. Humanitarian work must be needs based, impartial, independent and neutral.
3. CARE believes that all actors need to undertake stronger analysis of the internal humanitarian-development divide within their and other organisations.