The Pulse of Humanitarian Assistance

10. Coordination and Collaboration: An NGO View

10 Coordination and Collaboration: An NGO View Charles F. MacCormack Events over the past fifteen years have produced dramatic changes in the environment for humanitarian response organizations . The number of manmade and natural crises has accelerated to the point where there are two or three major crises—and dozens of lesser catastrophes—every year. The proliferation of wars and civil strife is a result of the end of the Cold War, expanding poverty in some parts of the world, the breakdown of traditional norms, especially among young people, the increasing availability of weapons, increasing population pressures, and migration from the countryside to urban areas. In terms of natural disasters, more and more people are living on more and more marginal lands. Events that would have impacted relatively few people a generation or two ago now affect hundreds of thousands. This constant and accelerating demand for action has definitely led to improved performance on the part of the international humanitarian community. The need to work together on a regular basis has led to the identification of best practices and the establishment of stronger inter-organizational relationships. There has been significant staff migration among the leading humanitarian organizations, a reflection of the often obvious, and neither surprising nor necessarily sinister, competition among humanitarian organizations. The quality and number of meetings to improve coordination has increased significantly. Having said this, the external environment confronting the humanitarian community continues to become increasingly complex. One factor that complicated global humanitarian work throughout the 1990s was the proliferation of failed and failing 244 CHARLES F. MacCORMACK states. Failed states lack effective political, economic, and social institutions. They are not just simple underachievers; instead, they demonstrate an inability to perform such classic state functions as exercising sovereignty over the national territory, providing a common defense, or maintaining law and order. They also are profoundly deficient in such modern state functions as resolving gross inequality, ensuring sound economic performance, and enhancing social welfare. States that are failing eventually become conflict-ridden and are prone to political violence and corruption ; they serve as havens for a range of criminal enterprises; and they become hotbeds of instability and refugee flows that can affect societies far beyond their own borders. Although there are many reasons for the proliferation of failed states, one major factor is that the Cold War structure suppressed many ethnic and other conflicts. With the Cold War’s demise these problems reemerged. Consequently, in the 1990s, humanitarian organizations worked much more often in conflict situations . As these conflicts proliferated, so too did the need to allocate money toward post-conflict reconstruction, relief, and conflict prevention, as compared to long-term development. These trends have created a situation whereby emergencies and crises have redirected an ever larger percentage of donor funding away from long-term development efforts. The unfortunate result is that, increasingly, the global humanitarian community’s efforts are now geared toward short-term issues, rather than tackling long-term solutions and conflict prevention. Humanitarian Work and the Lessons of the 1990s As the 1990s unfolded, so did a series of crises—Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Congo, and Rwanda—and for various reasons, few in the humanitarian community were good at managing these situations. To begin, we had inadequate plans for the political solutions and the military resources many of these crises required. Humanitarian workers found themselves in recurring hopeless situations. For example, in Rwanda, they pleaded for the French, the Americans, the United Nations—almost anyone—to COORDINATION AND COLLABORATION: AN NGO VIEW 245 bring military force to end the genocide. Yet no one was willing. This experience drove home several important lessons. Lesson One: Security Is Critical The first was that in violent situations, adequate military support was essential to deliver a humanitarian response. As a result, in the 1990s humanitarian organizations and militaries began to develop more useful rules of engagement. The net effect was greater appreciation for the complexity of contemporary humanitarian operations, for without security there could be no social development , but without social development there could be no longterm security. Lesson Two: The Need for Coordination A second lesson the 1990s taught the humanitarian community was the need to work together more effectively. At the beginning of the decade, responsibilities were unclear, with individual UN agencies focused primarily on their own operations, and with every...