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. The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), for example, emphasises the importance of nexusoriented refugee responses to ease pressures on host countries and enhance refugee self-reliance, particularly in cases of protracted displacement.

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.