Evaluator perceptions of NGO performance in disasters: meeting multiple institutional demands in humanitarian aid projects.

Liesbet Heyse,Rafael Wittek,Fernando Nieto Morales

doi:10.1111/disa.12419

Abstract

Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non‐governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005–11. The reports are compared using fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands.

Highlights

This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards
The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO’s internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands
Widespread insistence on the professionalisation of aid workers (Walker and Russ, 2010) generated more training efforts and attention to human resource management. These ‘rationalisation’ and ‘projectification’ processes (Krause, 2014) reflect a trend towards managerialism in the sector (Roberts, Jones, III, and Fröhling, 2005; Hwang and Powell, 2009). This could be at odds with the exigencies of local crisis contexts (Edwards, 1999; Lindenberg and Bryant, 2001), requiring that INGOs operate according to predefined rules, standards, and procedures, whereas organisational action in such settings often needs to be flexible and eventdriven (Barnett, 2005)

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. The performance of INGOs proved to be debatable, both in relation to complex emergencies (Sommer, 1994; Aall, Miltenberger, and Weiss, 2000) and disasters triggered by natural hazards (Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, 2006; Levine, Crosskey, and Abdinoor, 2011; Coyne, 2013) They experienced problems in adequately delivering aid to people in need, as was regularly reported in the ALNAP Annual Review of humanitarian action (see, for example, Borton and Robertson, 2002; Beck et al, 2003; Christoplos et al, 2004). The remainder of this section presents the underlying theoretical reasoning and applies it to the humanitarian context

Findings

Methods

Conclusion