There has been progress in relation to strengthening the ‘nexus’, especially when considering the complexity and long-standing concerns around the risks that greater collaboration with development actors may pose to principled humanitarian action, humanitarian space and independence. However, the ability to translate the ‘nexus’ from theory to practice, at scale, at country level remains a challenge. 

In many crises, some level of collaboration between humanitarian and development partners and government counterparts is already taking place. Indeed, this idea is not new. The ‘nexus’ is a continuation of long-established efforts to better link humanitarian and development response areas, including for example the ‘resilience agenda’; ‘linking relief rehabilitation and development’ (LRRD); ‘disaster risk reduction’ (DRR); and the embedding of ‘conflict sensitivity’ across responses. However, compared to earlier efforts to link relief with development, now, there is wide agreement on the need to work together, towards collective outcomes, achieved through joint planning and programming. This means working to manage complementarities instead of sequencing or transitioning between humanitarian and development programming.

Collective Outcomes through Joint Planning and Joint Programming

In this context, collective outcomes offer a strategic tool for humanitarians, development and peace actors to agree on a concrete and measurable result that they will jointly achieve, in a country, with the overall aim of reducing people’s needs, risks and vulnerability. 

Humanitarian assistance, development cooperation and peacebuilding should not be serial processes: they are all needed at the same time in order to reduce needs, risk and vulnerability (see IASC light guidance, 2020, p. 2). For humanitarian action, this means ensuring that activities can complement and transition more effectively to longer-term development and peace approaches, which can be implemented simultaneously. The concept of collective outcomes can be useful to think through the common results that humanitarian, development and peace actors want to achieve (see the IASC Issue paper, 2020, p. 16).  

Guidance on Collective Outcomes at Country Level 

Best practices and lessons learned have shown that collective outcomes must be highly-context specific - there is no one-size fits all approach to operationalizing collective outcomes. The IASC Light Guidance on Collective Outcomes (IASC, 2020), highlights eight main actions, which can help to operationalize, prioritize and sequence collective outcomes. These are:

1. Identify triggers to start the HDPN approach around collective outcomes.
2. Convene relevant stakeholders and ensure an inclusive process. 
3. Jointly analyse the drivers of protracted crises and determine priority short, medium and long-term actions to eliminate humanitarian needs and reduce future vulnerabilities in all three pillars.  
4. Prepare a nexus results framework with specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound (SMART) collective outcomes that can be implemented over a 3 to 5-year time frame, e.g. the Roadmap in Chad (see p. 10, here).   
5. Identify adequate financing for programmes contributing to collective outcomes (from existing programmes or new funding).
6. Implementing collective outcomes through the strengthening of coordination and information management at national and sub-national levels.
7. Collectively monitor progress and evaluate results building on existing arrangements (e.g. UNSDCF and/or HRP results frameworks).
8. Mainstream collective outcomes into plans such as HRP s, national development plans and agency / NGO strategic and operational plans. This does not replace the need for independent, principled plans for humanitarian action but provides a different approach to assess if a situation allows for overlapping work across the three pillars. If yes, collective outcomes should be considered, e.g. in Chad and Somalia, collective outcomes are included in the HRP (see p.16, here).

See more on the actions behind each of the eight steps, pp. 4-16 in the IASC Light Guidance (2020).

It is important, albeit challenging, to determine the right mix between the humanitarian, development and peace pillars, and the way in which they are integrated whilst also ensuring the preservation of humanitarian space and respect for humanitarian principles. For an overview of some of these challenges, see for example this discussion paper from Oxfam (2019), p. 4 or see p. 159 in the IASC Handbook for the RC and HC (2021).