Global governance for disaster risk reduction and humanitarian coherence has evolved through parallel but increasingly convergent tracks. The DRR frameworks (Yokohama → Hyogo → Sendai) developed alongside a growing recognition that humanitarian, development, and peace efforts must work together—not in silos. Understanding both lineages is essential for grasping where the field stands as the Sendai Framework approaches 2030 and the HDP Nexus matures.

The Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus—also called the “Triple Nexus”—is a conceptual framework and way of working that aims to strengthen the coherence, coordination, and complementarity between humanitarian action, development cooperation, and peacebuilding. Its central purpose is to reduce people’s needs, risks, and vulnerabilities; strengthen risk management capacities; and address the root causes of conflict and crisis.

The concept was formalized at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit through the “New Way of Working” commitment, which called on humanitarian and development actors to collaborate toward “collective outcomes” over multiple years, leveraging each actor’s comparative advantage. It was further codified in the 2019 OECD DAC Recommendation on the HDP Nexus—a legal instrument now adhered to by 39 entities (31 DAC members and 7 UN agencies as of 2024).

The Three Pillars

The Cluster Approach is the primary mechanism for coordinating international humanitarian response. Adopted by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) in 2005 as part of the Humanitarian Reform Agenda, it organizes humanitarian actors into sectoral groups—clusters—each with a designated lead agency responsible for coordination. The approach was born from failures: the independent Humanitarian Response Review, commissioned after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, found fragmented responses, duplication of effort, insufficient engagement with national actors, and unpredictable leadership in emergencies.

The cluster system was first deployed during the October 2005 Pakistan earthquake response. Since then, it has been activated in more than 60 countries. It was refined under the 2011 IASC Transformative Agenda, which addressed concerns that the approach had become overly process-driven and sometimes undermined rather than enabled delivery. In January 2025, the IASC published new guidance on cluster transition and deactivation, emphasizing that clusters are temporary coordination structures meant to build national capacity and progressively hand over to government-led mechanisms.

How the System Works

The 11 Global Clusters & Lead Agencies

Key Principles

How the Cluster System Connects to Other Frameworks

The cluster system does not operate in isolation. It intersects with every framework covered in this resource, though the depth and quality of these connections varies significantly.

The HFA was adopted in January 2005 at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Hyogo, Japan—just weeks after the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people. It served as the global DRR blueprint for a decade, aiming to substantially reduce disaster losses by 2015.

While groundbreaking, the HFA’s 10-year period saw more than 700,000 disaster deaths, over 1.4 million injuries, 23 million displaced, and $1.3 trillion in economic losses. Key limitations included no measurable targets, insufficient attention to root risk drivers, weak integration with development agendas, limited accountability mechanisms, and no consideration of conflict dynamics.

Adopted in March 2015, the SFDRR is the successor to the HFA and the first major agreement of the post-2015 development agenda. It emerged from three years of consultations and expanded scope to all hazards—natural, man-made, technological, biological, and environmental. It was designed for integration with the SDGs, Paris Agreement, New Urban Agenda, and Addis Ababa Action Agenda.

Seven Global Targets

These four frameworks operate at different levels and with different logics, but they increasingly need to work together. The table below highlights how they compare across key dimensions.

The HFA and Sendai Framework are sequential iterations of a single global DRR project. The Sendai Framework explicitly builds on the HFA’s achievements and addresses its gaps. But important tensions persist.

DRR and the HDP Nexus should be natural allies. Disaster risk reduction is, by definition, a bridge between humanitarian response and long-term development—precisely the kind of cross-pillar work the Triple Nexus calls for. Yet in practice, DRR and the HDP Nexus have evolved largely in parallel, with significant gaps between them.

Resilience is one of the most frequently invoked and contested concepts in humanitarian action, disaster risk reduction, and development. It appears in every framework covered in this resource — the HFA’s full title is “Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters,” Sendai Priority 3 calls for “investing in disaster reduction for resilience,” the HDP Nexus aims to “strengthen resilience” as a collective outcome, and cluster transition planning depends on building resilient national systems. Yet despite its ubiquity, resilience means different things in different contexts, and its use has been criticized both for conceptual vagueness and for potentially shifting responsibility from institutions to affected populations.

This section provides thorough definitions across institutional and academic frameworks, explains the three resilience capacities that humanitarian practitioners most commonly encounter, maps the types of resilience used across sectors, and critically examines how resilience connects to — and sometimes undermines — the other frameworks in this learning resource.

Core Definitions Across Frameworks

The Three Resilience Capacities

The most widely used operational framework for resilience in humanitarian and development practice breaks resilience into three interconnected and mutually reinforcing capacities. This framework, developed through the work of Béné et al. (2012), Oxfam, USAID, DFID, and others, provides the foundation for resilience measurement, programming, and evaluation across the sector.

Types & Domains of Resilience

Resilience is not monolithic. It manifests differently across social, economic, environmental, institutional, and infrastructure domains. Understanding these types helps practitioners design integrated interventions and avoid strengthening one dimension at the expense of another.

How Resilience Operates Across This Resource’s Frameworks

Critical Perspectives on Resilience

The HDP Nexus and DRR frameworks are embedded in a dense web of international agreements, standards, and tools. Understanding these connections is essential for effective humanitarian practice.

Consolidated references. All URLs verified as of February 2026.