Okezie Emuaga

The challenge of coordinating Non-Governmental Organizations during the delivery of humanitarian aid has been continuing with huge human and economic consequences. NGOs are the key actors during humanitarian action and have huge heterogeneity: diverse origins, interests, mandates and focus, and selectively collaborate. Many initiatives have been introduced to solve the coordination challenge since 1993 with limited success. Also since 2005, new transformation mechanisms have been introduced by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The tinkering suggests that there are unresolved tensions in the humanitarian coordination endeavour (Satterthwaite 2011). This led to our key research question: What is neutralising the coordination mechanisms used in Humanitarian Relief?  We review humanitarian relief through the lenses of governmentality (Rose 1999; Dean 2010; Dean 2013) and actor network theory (Cochoy 2014) in order to investigate the misalignments in the context heretofore obscured and its implications. This is based on qualitative research.