An alliance to enhance the effectiveness, timeless, reach and quality of the Dutch national humanitarian aid effort

The nature of humanitarian disasters has changed dramatically, with the twenty-first century defined by population displacement in the international community, prolonged state insecurity and looming climate catastrophe (Van Aalst, 2006). With fears of growing frequency and intensity of disasters, humanitarian actors in the form of national governments, Non-Government Organisations (NGO’s) and international organisations (such as the UN and the Red Cross) have increased the scale of their efforts. Now more than ever does the humanitarian sector have the capacity to detect and respond to crises, with significant reach and ability to save lives in places that could not have been conceived of a century ago (Davies, 2012). However, despite this growth the humanitarian sector not keeping up with the growing demands of more frequent, protracted and recurring humanitarian crises (de Castellarnau and Stoianova, 2016). This has resulted in weakening coverage of responses as funding cannot keep up with the costs of more people needing assistance in a greater variety of services in more complex crisis conditions (Healy, S. and Tiller, S., 2014; Canyon and Burkle, 2016; ALNAP, 2018). The result are calls for all levels of disaster response to improve efficacy, to do more with the current base of resources available to them. Therefore, promoting successful collaboration seems to be the most effective method of achieving reform as suggested by the UN’s High‐Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing (2016). In the Netherlands, these global challenges have been met by the establishment of the Dutch Relief Alliance (DRA). The DRA is a network consisting of sixteen of the largest Dutch NGO’s that work together to produce Joint Responses (JR’s), collaborative arrangements for distributing funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to further encourage collaboration in international disaster responses. The DRA changed the Dutch humanitarian landscape, as there has been a significant change in funding practices. Prior to 2015 the amount of humanitarian funding afforded directly to Dutch NGOs was a small portion of the MFAs humanitarian budget, with the majority going to both the ICRC and UN programs. Until 2013, NGOs received just 4% of the Dutch government’s humanitarian funding directly, compared with an average of 19% for other Northern European donors. Now funding sits at around 20% of the humanitarian budget, equalling roughly €60 million a year (Pottelbergh and Singh, 2017). No extensive evaluation of the DRA has been conducted to determine whether the DRA has improved the efficiency of humanitarian responses, however evaluations of staff perceptions so far indicate the vast majority believe it has improved collaboration in the sector (Pottelbergh and Singh, 2017). The purpose of this dissertation is then to explore how the DRA functions as a network for the governance of collaborative efforts between humanitarian actors. By examining the factors that contribute to successful collaboration it is the hope of this research to gain an insight in how to successfully promote collaboration in the international humanitarian sector. The research in this dissertation is conducted with theoretical foundations from a rich academic literature on collaborative and network governance, with an aim of building on the Collaborative Emergency Management (CEM) literature. Identified is a gap in the examination of how successful networks are created and sustained to promote collaboration in the international humanitarian aid sector. The DRA represents an early attempt at 4 providing this and hence is a highly relevant case study to the CEM literature. Through the literature on governance networks, particularly the work of Klijn and Koppenjan (2016), Ansell and Gash (2008) and Provan and Kenis (2008), the factors identified as critical to successful collaboration are the context of the network, features of the collaborative process, the structure and management of the network. By identifying the specifics of how these factors contribute to successful collaboration this research contributes to an early understanding of how to achieve reforms suggested by the UN’s High‐Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing (2016). The approach of this research is to emphasise the perspectives of those directly involved in the collaborative processes of the DRA through semi-structured interviews. These perspectives are supported by an analysis of key documents produced by the DRA and a coding method to determine positive and negative outlooks on the quality of collaboration produced. Evaluation of the critical factors found that an interplay among them allowed deliberative negotiations that resulted in a network conducive to collaboration. A context that already had an existing demand and momentum for such an arrangement was present. Each participant had a strong financial incentive to participate in processes, promoting compromise which was amplified by (and in turn amplified) a consensus-based decision-making process which was simultaneously implemented. ‘Step-by-step’ decision-making and structure formation complimented by a facilitation of participant initiative to drive processes resulted in an initially flexible structure that suited the unique demands created by the context and relations between actors. Therefore, some general characteristics that allowed this network to promote collaboration can be summarised as a shared contextual demand, financial-incentives to participate, consensus-based decision making, inductive governance arrangements and facilitative management. It must be emphasised that the relationship between these characteristics is complex and characterised by feedback. This is especially apparent where negotiated processes establish the structure of the network which in turn influence future processes through the precedent established. Furthering the implications of this, the outcome of processes has implications for the context of future processes, creating an overall reciprocal arrangement. The characteristics of the DRA derived from this research suggest that replicating the networks success does not equate to replicating a snapshot. The inductive governance approach implies a dynamic network that is characterised by a complex and reciprocal relation between the context, process and the mechanisms that define it. If national governments are attempting to replicate the DRA, taking the established processes and mechanisms of the network ignores what made it successful. Instead the approach should be replicated, possibly resulting in a successful collaborative network that has different features to the DRA.