Interorganizational trust, boundary spanning, and humanitarian relief coordination

This article examines the frequently cited argument that coordination issues in humanitarian relief can be addressed more effectively with greater centralized authority and argues for a new conceptualization of aid delivery. The former position suggests a hierarchical, top-down view of the humanitarian relief theater, while this analysis contends that the relief implementation structure may be better conceived as consisting of a network of loosely coupled semiautonomous organizations (Weick, 1976). A network approach allows examination of aid coordination dynamics at multiple levels of analysis: individual (professional and personal), organizational and interorganizational (operational), and strategic (structural/contextual). So viewed, factors that influence relief delivery, including contextual or strategic conditions and organization-scale concerns, may either encourage or dissuade coordination across institutional boundaries. We argue that trust is a key precondition to coordination and that its extension is in turn conditioned by a number of strategic and operating-level factors. We concentrate on operational coordination, as strategic concerns are not often open to the control of lone organizational actors. Our analysis rests in part on in-depth interviews (each consisted of open-ended questions and lasted an average of ninety to one hundred minutes) with a small sample of experienced international nongovernmental organization relief professionals who were engaged in aid efforts in Kosovo following the 1999 intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in that region.