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🚀 We are proud to launch our new report: A Decade of the HDP Nexus: Key Challenges, Lessons Learned, and Pathways to System Optimisation. Ten years after the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus is no longer just an aspirational framework—in today's climate of contracting aid budgets, it is an urgent operational necessity to prevent systemic aid collapse and maximize community impact. Drawing on a review of over 60 academic and policy sources, our synthesis report takes stock of progress since 2016, unpacks remaining structural blockages, and outlines actionable pathways for donors, international agencies, and local actors. 📌 Key Focus Areas: Localisation: True progress requires a real redistribution of decision-making authority and flexible resources to local actors, moving beyond transactional subcontracting. Peace: The peace pillar must shift from political rhetoric to conflict-sensitive, bottom-up programming that targets structural drivers of grievance and marginalisation. Financing: Donors must overcome siloed funding by expanding predictable, multi-year, and pooled financing mechanisms. Coordination: Systems must move away from process-heavy meetings toward genuine collaboration built around community-defined collective outcomes. The barriers to an integrated aid system are no longer technical or conceptual—they are political and institutional. It is time to move past policy rhetoric and drive concrete operational change on the ground. 📖 Read and download the full report here:

REFLECTION No. 002 Perhaps one of the hardest challenges faced by responding entities is to “do more with less”. This phrase strikes fear and frustration into the hearts of the most experienced aid workers, as it has been the mantra for several years now. While intended to promote efficiency, it is a mantra that has become synonymous with the abolishment of posts, and the reduction of resources where they are often needed most. As a result, most entities look inwardly, identifying areas of resource flexibility, or suspending/ cancelling less critical activities and operations. But significant cost-efficiencies can be found where agencies are not working together; where duplication of efforts abound. Research and analysis often face this challenge, and is most evident when analysis of an emergent situation is needed. Rather than pausing long enough to identify common data needs and potential shared research, entities tend to conduct their own surveys and analyses, sometimes in the same location and at the same time as others. The same questions, with perhaps a small tailoring to the agency’s mandate, are asked repeatedly of people who are in urgent need of help. To compound this waste of resources, agencies often arrive with food and non-food items linked to their mandate as a sweetening of the request for information. These “gifts” are sometimes the result of a needs assessment, but more often a reflection of the agency’s mandate. As a result, such “gifts” may be thrown or given away, as was often witnessed in Somalia in the 1980’s: CSM biscuits distributed to refugees were considered better as livestock feed. How the Nexus Approach Can Contribute to Cost-Savings and Cost-Effectiveness The nexus approach provides two concrete opportunities to contribute to cost-savings and cost-effectiveness: collective actions and prevention always. Collective actions: One of the key characteristics of the nexus approach is collectivism. Stakeholders and partners are urged to work together towards achieving collective outcomes. Taking that spirit of partnership to all aspects of assistance would include joint assessment missions, information sharing and joint programming. Sectoral or thematic coordination mechanisms can be transformed into common support mechanisms, such as joint analysis units, programme support units, and operational units such as procurement, logistics, transportation, offices and recruitment. Joint programming would be characterised by joint teams, rather than each partner having its own complete programme team. Even if not possible across agencies, within organisations there can be shared teams for core operations, rather than separate teams for each project. This can apply to donors as well as implementers; there are examples where this has been done successfully among smaller donor presences in some countries, to enable each to be present without the cost of a full team for each country. The immediate effect of these actions is that more funds can be delivered as direct costs to beneficiaries, rather than swallowed by personnel charged to the project. The nexus takes a longer-term view in regards to having an impact, but depends on the foundational structures and activities undertaken during the immediate term, consolidated and fortified in the medium term, and resilient and localised in the longer term. Prevention always: While this is often viewed in a humanitarian context, preventive development can contribute significantly to reducing the impact of crises on a community or nation. Over the years there have been mantras such as “build back better”, but there is little advocacy for “build better first”. Situational analysis complemented by scenario analysis is needed to determine how potential impacts can be mitigated, whether it is a flood, pandemic, or conflict. A strong prevention and mitigation process also builds communities’ social cohesion, which is just as important as building back better. Over time, these interventions with national development investments, as well as external support if needed, will create resilient and sustainable communities and nations able to withstand known potential shocks with less negative impact and therefore reduced need for resources to rebuild. This kind of cost-saving happens mostly for the donors, but eventually also for the national budget as prevention and mitigation investments and measures are put in place and become standard practice. Traditionally, the nexus approach is considered in contexts with a crisis – a humanitarian situation. However, considering the proactivity of the “prevention always” concept in the nexus, it would make both fiscal and humanitarian sense to initiate the nexus approach in development contexts a priori. There will always be some sort of humanitarian need, whether as a result of internal dynamics or as spill over from a neighbouring country. Climate change is perhaps the strongest argument for the development actors to take the nexus seriously and engage in preventive development thinking. Climate change has no natural or political boundaries, and response to its impacts needs to be collective, serving those most affected in a given area. If each country only works within its territory in devising responses, those investments will be lost if neighbouring countries are not part of the response as well. This requires regional political and resource coordination, strong causal analysis of identified risks, and engagement of populations likely to be impacted. Development actors and national stakeholders need to recognise the benefit of upfront investments reducing costs in the long term by reducing impacts and therefore need for humanitarian assistance. Conclusion: Funders seek cost-savings, but they must also see the need for investment in preventive actions to realise those savings sustainably. Short-term measures of cutting financial and human resources will have only a short-term internal effect, and potentially lead to accelerated deterioration of the humanitarian situation requiring increased resources. However, if resources are invested in the nexus, and specifically in promoting preventive development action linked to humanitarian response and peacebuilding, the need for humanitarian resources and assistance will reduce in the future. With the growing impacts of climate change, population growth, and poverty on all nations, it is essential to act now with a full understanding of the immediate needs, and the desired long-term impact, and invest financing towards achieving that impact. The nexus approach helps stakeholders work together, rather than in silos, and gives the leadership and decision-making into the hands of those impacted rather than those who pay. Download the Article as a PDF There are a number of excellent training programmes to help organisations and individuals understand the concepts underlying the HDP Nexus, but few move participants to the next steps of operationalisation. The Centre for HDP Nexus Solutions (C4NS) was created to address this gap; to provide support services to all levels of actors and stakeholders, promoting localisation as key to the success of any programming, regardless of whether it is labelled as humanitarian, development or peace. Services range from assessments at the country and organisational levels, training of staff and stakeholders, and support to strategic planning for durable solutions. Contact us for more information at: connect@hdpnexus.org.

REFLECTION No. 001 In response to the shift in the humanitarian landscape, the Humanitarian Reset initiative was launched by the ERC Tom Fletcher in March 2025, signalling significant introspection and reform, dealing with hard issues impacting the efficiency and efficacy of humanitarian assistance delivery. Of particular note is the shift to more localised leadership, with a focus on empowering local actors through inclusion in consultations and advisory mechanisms. The streamlining of country-level coordination mechanisms is part of this process, including the reduction of the clusters from 15 to eight. Source: [IASC] However, the documentation online gives no indication of how the reset would embrace the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus concept. The Humanitarian Reset is an opportunity to also reset the decision-making processes that are needed for the HDP Nexus operationalisation to be sustainable and locally led. Herewith are a few considerations that could easily be implemented, particularly by the UN, as part of the reset: UN Resident Coordinators/Humanitarian Coordinators and national authorities create high-level national nexus coordination mechanisms responsible for promoting the nexus at policy and strategic levels. This mechanism would be responsible for bringing together relevant national and local authorities, INGOs, donors, civil society representatives, and local, national and (if appropriate) regional actors, to promote shared responsibility for joint analysis, prioritisation, planning and decision-making. In coordination with sub-national clusters indicated in the IASC’s “Guidance Cluster Simplification and Adapting In-Country Coordination” (March 2026) Source: [IASC], these nexus coordination mechanisms would ensure collective action of all stakeholders across the three pillars. It would encourage regional, local and community-led initiatives, through support to local assessments, identification of local resources both for implementation and maintaining the results, and promotion of an inclusive process focusing on women, youth and marginalised elements of the area. Conduct combined Humanitarian Country Team/UN Country Team meetings at key strategic planning moments to ensure complementarity and collective outcomes. This is being done in some environments but should be a more common practice. It would include intentional linkages between the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) and the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) through more concrete collective outcomes and Strategic Objectives respectively, underpinned by collective planning and decision-making with all stakeholders. Create more inclusive opportunities for civil society to participate in strategic discussions, decision making and implementation throughout the programme cycles of the HNRP and UNSDCF. They are more than key informants and beneficiaries – they are stakeholders whose voices need to be amplified and heard. Eventually merge the HNRP and UNSDCF into a single process and document. While there have been strides, with the UNSDCF guidelines requiring evidence of complementarity with the HNRP, the ideal would be for a single strategic framework that shows the relationships and synergies between humanitarian, development and peace initiatives, over the short-, medium- and longer terms. This approach would be particularly advantageous for those countries that are not facing chronic humanitarian crisis but will be impacted by global challenges such as climate change, displacement and conflict. Through the UNSDCF and national strategic frameworks in particular, this would promote proactive prevention and mitigation measures against potential crises with shared assessments and monitoring of crisis and conflict indicators, sustainable analysis, and increased localisation. Strengthened preventive development initiatives would build resilience and national stakeholder capacities to manage emerging crises. Donors adapt funding mechanisms into financing for durable solutions. Instead of having different “pockets” for humanitarian and development programming, create durable solutions or nexus financing mechanisms that encourage collective and integrated programming between humanitarian and development actors. In particular, the focus would be on supporting civil society and institutions at local and national levels. One caveat for the use of the funds would be a visible peace impact as part of the programming. Recognise the foundational role of the peace pillar. Peace is a charged topic, with political and emotional implications. Breaking it down to “big P” (political peace process; peacekeeping, etc.) and “little P” (such as social cohesion) is not sufficient to build a shared understanding of what the peace pillar means in practice among humanitarian, development, peace, government, civil society and local actors. Taking this approach promotes rather than deconstructs silos. While recognising that there are some firewalls to be maintained, it is essential that peacebuilding is an integral impact of any intervention, in any context. First steps include conflict sensitivity, peace responsiveness, and inclusion of marginalised sectors of the population as central elements of any Nexus approach. Create a common strategic narrative to promote the nexus thinking. Each entity has its own terminology, definitions of concepts, mandate and principles of engagement, all of which can present a barrier to working with others. Understanding each other is key to real collaborative thinking and collective action. Collective outcomes require collective thinking, and taking the time to understand each other’s parameters and capacities for engagement in nexus operationalisation is critical to moving the agenda forward. Coordination and collaboration can be facilitated by having a shared understanding of and narrative towards nexus operationalisation. It is not merging and it is not choosing one value set and terminology over another. It is coherence and communication. Recognise the value of localisation in bringing about sustainable peace and building resilient communities and nations. Current modalities of humanitarian and development aid can be disempowering, keeping local stakeholders in a role of passive recipient rather than creator and decision-maker of what is to be done. The perception of national stakeholders’ capacity and roles in making change happen needs to shift from transactional implementers to recognising them as decision-makers and drivers of change. The Humanitarian Reset is a critical step in creating a more inclusive and agile humanitarian ecosystem. But it needs to go further, to embrace the potentials offered by the HDP Nexus operationalisation. While some of these recommendations are being done in some contexts, they need to be internalised into all stakeholder institutions for there to be real impact. Trust-building will be as important as operationalising a new UN strategic narrative, with the inclusion of peace and capacity building in the coming years, and localisation as the key to making change happen. Download the Article as a PDF There are a number of excellent training programmes to help organisations and individuals understand the concepts underlying the HDP Nexus, but few move participants to the next steps of operationalisation. The Centre for HDP Nexus Solutions (C4NS) was created to address this gap: to provide support services to all levels of actors and stakeholders, promoting localisation as key to the success of any programming, regardless of whether it is labelled as humanitarian, development or peace. Services include assessments at the country and organisational levels, training of staff and stakeholders, support to strategic planning for durable solution and hands-on guidance to help teams translate Nexus ambition into concrete operational decisions. For more information, contact us at: connect@hdpnexus.org.

Turning the HDP Nexus from policy language into practice is rarely straightforward. Organisations often face difficult questions around joint analysis, collective outcomes, localisation, adaptive programming, risk management, coordination, and the practical alignment of humanitarian, development and peace efforts. The Centre for HDP Nexus Solutions (C4NS) provides expert helpdesk support for organisations working to operationalise the HDP Nexus in real contexts. Our support is designed to be practical, responsive and grounded in field experience, helping teams move from broad commitments to clearer decisions, better coordination and more coherent implementation. Through the C4NS Helpdesk, organisations can access tailored support on issues such as: clarifying nexus priorities and entry points; reviewing project or programme design; strengthening collective outcomes and coordination mechanisms; integrating localisation, participation and accountability; navigating risk, conflict sensitivity and peace dimensions; adapting workplans, portfolios or implementation approaches; and documenting learning, challenges and emerging good practice. C4NS brings together practitioners, advisers and technical specialists with direct experience in HDP Nexus policy, programming and coordination. The Helpdesk offers timely advice, practical tools and access to a wider network of expertise, depending on the needs of each organisation. Whether you are designing a new initiative, reviewing an existing programme, preparing a proposal, or dealing with implementation challenges, C4NS can provide targeted support to help you make the Nexus more operational, credible and useful. Need support with an HDP Nexus challenge? Get in touch with C4NS to discuss how our Helpdesk can support your organisation. Contact us at: connect@hdpnexus.org.