Food insecurity is on the rise, driven predominantly by violent conflict and climate change. Resource-poor countries are among the worst affected and many depend on foreign assistance to respond to the growing crisis.

At the same time, the vast amounts of assistance have failed to break the vicious circle between food insecurity and violent conflict and there is a growing policy consensus on the need to strengthen the synergies between humanitarian, development and peacebuilding (HDP) assistance. To this end, key donor governments, multilateral agencies and international organizations signed the ‘Grand Bargain: Agenda for Humanity’ at the 2016 United Nations World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), which contained commitments to better align HDP action. However, only a small proportion of foreign aid—estimated at some hundreds of millions of dollars of a possible $60 billion—genuinely supports harmonized humanitarian, development and peacebuilding efforts.1 In South Sudan, protracted violent conflict and the consequences of climate change have driven the majority of the population into poverty and acute food insecurity, generating widespread dependence on humanitarian food aid (see section II). Addressing recurrent humanitarian needs calls for sustainable longer-term interventions that combine HDP approaches. This study identifies four main challenges that donors face in seeking to support successful implementation of the HDP nexus to tackle food insecurity in South Sudan. First, there is ambiguity around concept of the HDP nexus, and the peace-related element in particular. Second, there is too little of the contextual knowledge required for solid context and conflict analyses, which is linked to the limited capacity and flexibility of donors. Third, collaboration and coordination present challenges due to the persistent fragmentation of HDP bodies or administrative units within donor institutions, as well as the lack of accountability of the South Sudanese government which makes working with it highly problematic. Finally, there are problems with enabling localization, due to a perceived lack of capacity among local organizations, the risk aversion of donors and unequal power dynamics. The paper suggests ways forward and draws on a positive example of good practice in section IV.