FORCED DISPLACEMENT AND THE HUMANITARIAN-DEVELOPMENT NEXUS: A ROUNDTABLE ANTHOLOGY

Following calls for a “New Way of Working” to achieve Agenda 2030 and commitments made at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, policymakers have increasingly looked to the “nexus approach” to address protracted forced displacement crises. This approach can be defined as an aim to strengthen collaboration, coherence, and complementarity across humanitarian, development, and peace actions by focusing on collective outcomes and sustainable solutions. 

Although the nexus approach has been lauded for offering new tools to tackle displacement crises, actors working within the nexus of humanitarian aid and development have faced a wide range of challenges, from differences in institutional cultures and the lack of flexible financing to finding the right balance between short-term interventions to meet immediate needs and long-term goals to ensure self-reliance and socioeconomic integration. Critics have also argued that the nexus approach often lacks context-sensitivity, impact, and regard for humanitarian and protection mandates.

Against this background, EBA organised a series of exclusive roundtable discussions on the nexus approach and forced displacement during Spring 2021. The series brought together world-leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on the nexus in displacement contexts, bearing in mind three goals. First, we wanted to foster an exchange of experiences, ideas, and best practices between participants. Second, we sought to identify critical areas of future research for participating researchers and the EBA secretariat. Third, we aimed to expand EBA’s network of experts working on the nexus and forced displacement to identify potential writers for future reports, as well as members for future reference groups.

The series featured three roundtable discussions structured around different themes: internal displacement, livelihoods and financial health, and coherent displacement responses (the third roundtable on coherent displacement responses was co-organised with the OECD Development Centre).  At the end of this report, we present an analysis of some of the shared conclusions that emerged from the three roundtables.