Analyzing Coordination Structures for Effective Humanitarian Relief Operations

Despite significant efforts by humanitarian actors, initiatives, and donors to improve coordination among humanitarian organizations during disaster response, the challenge of insufficient coordination persists. Drawing on practical considerations, the authors develop a stylized non-cooperative game-theoretical model to examine the coordination dynamics between large international and small local humanitarian organizations in the aftermath of a disaster, comparing both pooled and partitioned coordination models. Their findings reveal that bureaucratic delays commonly associated with coordination efforts not only deter collaboration but can also result in coordination levels that are detrimental to overall relief system performance. This analysis underscores the importance of rethinking coordination structures to better reflect the specific context of relief efforts. In alignment with calls for increased localization, they demonstrate that an efficiently designed partitioned coordination model outperforms a pooled model, which often marginalizes smaller local actors. This partitioned approach proves particularly effective in emergency settings, bringing actors’ decisions closer to the optimal outcome for the entire system.