Inclusive Coordination: Building an Area-Based Humanitarian Coordination Model

Coordination is essential to effective humanitarian action, yet the core humanitarian coordination and planning architecture—the cluster system—is beset by persistent weaknesses. It is dominated by large international aid organizations and is much less accessible to local frontline actors and governments. It organizes humanitarian action around major technical sectors rather than applying a holistic, people-centered approach to relief priorities. It siloes humanitarian planning and fundraising through sectoral siloes, producing fragmented funding and program implementation. It is heavily centralized, and weak at the frontlines. The net result is a coordination and planning system in which the needs and priorities of affected people are intermediated through an architecture oriented more toward the prerogatives of major aid agencies.