ReliefWeb

Key messages on the humanitarian-development nexus and its links to peace

1. Against the back drop of the SDGs—with the promise of leaving no one behind, ending needs by reducing risks and vulnerabilities is now a shared commitment within the UN and the IASC. Building on major global processes, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the World Humanitarian Summit, the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants, the twin resolutions on Sustaining Peace, the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration, and the OECD DAC recommendation on the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus, new working methods across the humanitarian and development are recognized as imperative, especially with the aim to improve the protection environment and contribute to prevention and peace.

2. Protracted humanitarian crises continue to increase in numbers. Over recent years, the nature of crises has evolved both in numbers of affected people and in complexity. These are often caused by drawn-out violent conflicts, frequently impacting neighbouring countries – and have resulted in massive levels of displacement lasting for decades. This adversely affects the ability to strengthen national institutions and human capital. These situations cannot be solved through short-term or incremental approaches.

3. Reducing the impact of protracted crises on affected populations requires both meeting immediate needs and investing in the medium to long term to reduce chronic vulnerabilities and risks affecting communities. It requires boosting resilience and building self-reliance by strengthening formal and informal institutions and communities’ capacities, improving livelihoods, and increasing access to services that can enhance people’s ability to cope with current disasters and withstand future crisis, while addressing the root causes to crises and vulnerabilities. In practice, this requires providing short-, medium- and longer-term assistance concurrently to vulnerable people, while prioritizing “reaching those furthest behind first”.

4. In protracted crises, development and peacebuilding activities are often possible but are under-resourced. These activities need to be planned and started at the onset of a crisis in close coordination with humanitarian actors and mindful of humanitarian principles, both within the country and neighbouring asylum countries, as relevant. In these contexts, neutral humanitarian assistance is focused on life-saving and quick-impact goals but has become a gap-filling measure, providing independent basic social services perennially, thus increasing the risk of aid dependency. At the same time, prevention and peacebuilding measures are generally initiated too late, not prioritized or insufficiently sustained, and are constrained by limited traction for political solutions.

5. Aid actors must evolve their thinking and working methods to address these issues more coherently. This applies equally to dealing with the long-term consequences of drought; to managing the impacts of intractable violent conflicts that impede the prospects of peace and development; to ensuring durable solutions for the millions of displaced populations; to mitigating the generational impacts of infectious diseases; or to contributing to prevention and peace in the midst of contexts of violence or prone to violence.