The Triple Nexus and the Future of Multilateral Governance: Rethinking Coordination between Humanitarian, Development and Peacebuilding Efforts

The UN-orchestrated Triple Nexus – a multilateral endeavour to provide humanitarian-development-peace responses in fragile and conflict-affected contexts – embodies several features of the emerging trend towards governance through regime complexity. Praised for its multi-actorness inclusivity and cross-policy experimentalism, the Nexus approach has been criticised as an attempt to replicate top-down, neo-liberal templates to govern crises in the peripheries. We analyse the new evidence provided in this Special Issue, connecting it to the debate on the future of multilateral governance, against the decline of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Guarding against naïve expectations of the Nexus as a panacea to bridge cross-policy gaps and bring about inter-agency cooperation amidst increased geopolitical tensions, we discuss its potential to become a venue for an enlarged conversation among traditional and new players. While also compatible with pluralist scenarios, a progressive variety of the Nexus may well emerge in the UN context, between Western and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) players. Their shared understandings of civil and political rights offer a promising avenue to advance some forward-looking Nexus components, supportive of individual and nature-based rights, to govern the increased complexity of the current multiplex order.
Keywords: Triple Nexus; global governance; Liberal International Order; NGOs; Global South