Collaborative exploration of the humanitarian aid transition

Abstract

The humanitarian aid transition between short-­term relief and long-term development is often poorly managed, since Non-­Governmental Organizations (NGOs) do not understand the nature of challenges that occur within this transitional period. Rethink Relief, an initiative of scholars at both Delft University of Technology and Massachusetts Institute for Technology, is a platform that aims to reach common understanding of these transitional challenges amongst humanitarian professionals by organizing annual seven-­day collaborative design workshops. The objective of this graduation project was to develop a collaboration tool for humanitarian professionals, which supports them in a collaboration process. Preliminary research showed that since there is no institutional location for the humanitarian aid transition, no NGO feels responsible or understands humanitarian aid transition challenges fully. Collaboration between NGOs is mostly hindered by mandate obligations and funding issues. For a successful collaboration process, many factors need to be addressed that maximize the performance of the collaborating team members. These factors include a shared understanding of the content and goals of a collaboration project. Furthermore collaborating organizations must be actively guided towards shared understanding, to be able to achieve satisfying results. Through an iterative design process a concept collaboration tool, in the form of a set of tools for a half-day workshop, was created. Under the supervision of a workshop facilitator, humanitarian professionals work together on a predefined topic within the humanitarian aid transition. The goal of the workshop was to create solutions for a collaboratively identified issue. The workshop process and tool were designed to achieve shared understanding on a selected issue identified by workshop participants, whilst developing suitable solutions. Reaching shared understanding was considered to be the foundation of a potential collaborative partnership between the participating NGOs. Concluding from two separate user tests of the concept collaboration tool, participants felt they had reached shared understanding on the issues they had been working on. However, the general tendency amongst participants towards starting a collaborative partnership was reticent. It was found that the created solutions were not detailed enough to build a collaborative partnership on. Improvements to the concept collaboration tool have been made to help participants make the end results of workshop more specific to their identified issue. The created collaboration tool gives Rethink Relief the means to build shared understanding on the humanitarian aid transition amongst humanitarian professionals at a quicker pace. Smaller half-­day events can be organized next to the annual seven-­day event. This way, the threshold to get involved will become lower for humanitarian professionals, resulting in an increase of professionals with the same understanding of humanitarian aid transition challenges.