The ‘Triple Nexus’: Where the humanitarian, development and peace sectors work together to make the most of their comparative advantages to enable a more coherent, efficient and collective response to global challenges.
This is an attractive prospect in South Sudan, which continues to experience a range of interconnected crises and shocks that cannot be addressed in isolation. Donors and organisations at all levels therefore proactively engage each other to share information and knowledge, ensure better use of resources, fund mobilisation during implementation, scale-up effective approaches and build on best practices.
As such, the triple nexus shares a lot of its DNA with the idea of conflict sensitivity: Both approaches aim to make aid and international cooperation more effective, participatory and collaborative, ask those working across the aid spectrum to build strategies and responses focused on long-term causes of chronic need and vulnerability, and require programming to become more responsive to local experiences and perspectives, tailored to specific contexts and able to respond to complex and multifaceted needs.
To meet these demands, create a common understanding of the Triple Nexus and tackle the rise in poverty and conflict globally and in South Sudan, a change in approach is needed. Otherwise, the term – also known as the humanitarian, development, peace HDP nexus – remains just a buzzword.
Indeed, South Sudanese NGOs have called for a cultural shift towards innovative ways of working and collaborating and the CSRF picked up on this sentiment in two recent publications: In their paper on the Triple Nexus and conflict sensitivity, Natalia Chan and Nora Schmidlin argue that an effective and conflict sensitive triple nexus-approach in South Sudan needs to 1) be grounded in local understandings and readings of the situation, 2) strengthen the peace component and 3) meaningfully engage with communities.
Even more pointedly on community engagement within triple nexus-approaches, the second paper provides five key lessons for aid practitioners: To ensure that 1) engagement responds to communities’ capacities and preferences and (2) is better coordinated across humanitarian, development and peace actors, 3) that communities are well equipped to cooperate with aid actors, 4) to include local governments in a conflict sensitive way in these engagement processes, and (5) to create incentives for implementing partners to better respond to community preferences and to coordinate with other agencies.
In the absence of such efforts, a lack of and coordination between aid agencies as well as limited engagement with local and national civil society have hampered efforts to build the nexus in the true sense of the word. In South Sudan, a particular roadblock has been an inbuilt aversion to programming risks, which, coupled with a lack of un-earmarked, flexible funding, is inhibiting innovation.
At the same time, revitalised discussions around the Triple Nexus and a new five-year UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework on the cards have injected fresh perspectives and energy. This is an important step to renew commitments and do things differently within the aid sector and allows more stakeholders to participate in these discussions, for example local aid actors including CSOs based outside of Juba.
Doing so puts the Triple Nexus again at centerstage and there are various examples in South Sudan that support a more comprehensive nexus approach that leads to greater complementarity and collaboration across actors:
There is for example the Partnerships for Peace, Recovery and Resilience PfPRR mechanism (formerly the Partnerships for Recovery and Resilience) led by the UN, which is a platform to coordinate and collaborate aid interventions; there are that provide support for a long-term vision and attempt to tackle problems across the different sectors, knitting in community cohesion and trauma healing to their humanitarian and development work; or South Sudanese NGOs actively forging alliances to contribute to long-lasting and effective impact through their ability to implement in more sectors, more locations and address multiple issues at the community level.
Likewise, a growing awareness builds around the business of aid in South Sudan and the Triple Nexus. As one aid worker put it: ‘it is also about business and politics of aid, all you have to do is follow the money’. While establishing NGO alliances can be seen as a response to anticipated funding shortcomings and more intense competition with other NNGOs and INGOs for the same funding, it also presents an opportunity for these NGOs to magnify their reach and respond to their community’s needs. In this sense, NGO alliances also contribute to coordinating joined-up approaches and information-sharing among them – they live in that context, experience the same problems, and are immediately held accountable by the community.
On the flipside, it is important to keep in mind that in South Sudan are within the aid sector and business of aid becomes sensitive when aid funding underpins the economic viability of many South Sudanese people. This challenge needs to be integrated when discussing new ways of funding and collaborating across different aid actors, at vertical and horizontal partnership level.
In the face of the challenges and opportunities mentioned above, it is time for taking stock and internal reflections among aid actors that have implemented interventions over the last two decades in South Sudan. A constructive starting point for this might be to venture out of the international aid bureaucracy and instead actively listening to South Sudanese people, both within and outside of the aid sector. Only in this way we will realize coordinated initiatives in the spirit of the Triple Nexus and overcome working in silos, something we cannot afford anymore.
‘In order to be more conflict sensitive, we need to work collectively to enhance our contributions towards peace, changing how we do it, adapting programmes to the context, ensuring our intent is deliberate and has a solid understanding of the context and a willingness to learn and adapt’. Whilst we can’t afford to work in siloes anymore, we can work together within the Triple Nexus, reflecting on the South Sudan context and the literature around the little ‘p’ and the Big ‘P’ by contributing to a self-reliant, peaceful society in South Sudan’. CSRF Team, CSRF South Sudan Context Course, December 2022.
