Getting Peace to Work: a process-tracing exploration of UN-led Triple Nexus coordination in Cameroon

The ‘system doesn’t work’ is possibly the most common refrain within foreign aid policy circles. Several reform agendas have emerged over the decades to try and address the shortcomings of the sector. The Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus, or Triple Nexus, is but the latest attempt in this tradition. While policy actors at the global level, especially the United Nations and institutional donors, have embraced this purportedly novel approach, country-level implementation has struggled. The novelty of the addition of peace to longstanding discussions of a potential humanitariandevelopment double nexus is what motivates the present investigation into the reasons that explain the limited integration of peace actors within UN-led Triple Nexus coordination. This process-tracing exploration focuses on the case study of Cameroon, a relatively successful Triple Nexus pilot country, between 2019 and 2025 to unpack the mechanisms that underlie the limited engagement of peace actors by Triple Nexus coordination. The research adopts a well-established qualitative approach, Explaining Outcome Process-Tracing, because of its capacity to integrate inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning for the development and testing of causal mechanisms. Primary data collection consisted of 20 semi-structured interviews in both French and English. Findings from a first stage of six interviews suggested that the limited integration of the peace pillar within UN-led Triple Nexus coordination might be explained by one of three theories. These three potential causal narratives were centred respectively around (a) the weak intra-pillar cohesion and inter-pillar connections of the peace pillar, (b) humanitarian organisations’ principled pushback against peace actors, and (c) the scarcity of peace-specific funding made available by institutional donors. As part of two months of fieldwork in Yaoundé (Cameroon), an additional fourteen interviews were conducted to test these three theories. During this second research stage, evidence ...