Partner Coordination in Crisis Settings: Why it Breaks Down When Urgency is Highest

Across the last decade, as international aid has steadily fragmented, duplication of funding and effort has become one of the quieter costs of that shift.

What this means is that two donors funding near-identical projects in the same town, without ever having spoken to one another, is closer to routine than to exception.

The magnitude looks small, but multiply that across a crisis response involving a dozen partners and several donors, each answering to a different headquarters with a different timeline, and the gap between meeting and practice stops being minor.

This rarely gets named as clearly as it should, because most people inside it are too occupied managing the day-to-day to step back and call it what it is. Yar Deng, an international development and humanitarian expert, has seen this firsthand.

Through this article, and through our conversations with Yar, we want to move past the assumption that coordination breaks down because people aren't communicating enough, and look instead at what happens once more than one organisation is expected to agree on what a shared response actually requires - the kind of gap that shows up as agreement in the room and nothing different on the ground the next day.

Showing up isn't the same as working together

Many program leaders treat a signed memorandum of understanding, a joint workplan, or a seat at the quarterly coordination meeting as proof that partners are genuinely aligned.

But the truth is that this rarely happens.

Think about the last coordination meeting you sat in with a consortium partner. Did anything about how either of you worked change afterwards, or did you both return to delivering your own component exactly as before?

When you signed off on a shared workplan, did it reflect a theory of change you and your partners had actually built together, or one everyone agreed to sign because signing was what the donor required?

When we spoke with Yar, she took us through a consortium project she had been part of directly, one split across three partner organisations, each responsible for a different component of the same programme.

From the outset, each partner ran their piece as though they were operating entirely alone. Coordination surfaced only when a scheduled meeting forced everyone into the same room, and even then, questions about progress were often waved off toward whoever held that particular piece of work.

"The coordinator is the one implementing this," was the answer Yar heard more than once, as though the rest of the consortium existed at arm's length from its own project.

Field visits told the same story from a different angle. Partners with genuinely different strengths, the kind that could have complemented each other's work, rarely contributed anything to what the others were doing. As Yar put it, describing the wider pattern beyond this one project:

"People are usually focused on their own funding. Like they just look straight and not looking left or right to see."

Quarterly check-ins existed on the workplan and so did the coordination mechanism written into the MOU. None of it required a single partner to actually see what the others were doing day-to-day or to adjust their own delivery in response to it.

That gap is manageable, if not exactly comfortable, when a project is running to plan, and funding is stable. It stops being manageable the moment either of those conditions disappears, which is precisely what happens when a crisis hits.

Why crisis conditions expose system weaknesses

The coordination gaps described above rarely cause visible damage in ordinary conditions. There's usually enough funding, enough time, and enough room for error that two partners working in parallel rather than together just means some inefficiency nobody has to answer for.

Crisis removes that room. When funding contracts, which it typically does right as needs spike, the same partners who weren't really coordinating before now have every reason to actively protect what they have rather than share it.

The scale of recent cuts makes this concrete. It should take, for instance, the closure of USAID in early 2025, when the US terminated roughly 83 per cent of the agency's humanitarian and development programs almost overnight.

By the end of 2025, the UN's global humanitarian appeal had reached only 28 per cent of what it needed, the lowest funding level in more than four years. Partners operating in that environment aren't just short on funds, but also on the confidence that any funding they still have will still be there next quarter.

Think about what that does to how you'd behave in that position. A partner who might normally flag a gap in coverage, or share a lesson from their component of the response, has reason to stay quiet instead, because surfacing a weakness can read as an invitation for a donor to ask why continued funding is justified when someone else nearby is already managing.

Coordination that was merely absent before becomes actively costly now. Duplicated response in one area, silence about a gap in another, and nobody positioned to see the whole picture because nobody was ever structurally responsible for seeing it.

There's a sharper counterpoint underneath this, though. When international staff get evacuated or lose access, local partners are often handed real decision-making authority for the first time, simply because there's no one else left to make the call.

"We trust them to make the decision we didn't want to give them before," is how Yar described that shift.”

The authority didn't need a crisis to exist. It needed a reason to be handed over, and that reason had less to do with what a local partner could actually do than with who held power in the partnership before the crisis forced the question.

Where incentives become misaligned

Yar pointed to something donors rarely say out loud: that a meaningful share of aid funding comes down to geopolitics, a government wanting influence or a foothold in a region regardless of who else is already funding work there.

Two donors can each act entirely rationally according to their own priorities and still completely duplicate each other, because coordinating with the other was never the goal.

A different mechanism plays out on the delivery side. A local partner flags that something isn't landing, a distribution communities don't want, a design that misses what people need. The international partner hears it, sometimes agrees, and the feedback still doesn't travel back up to change anything, not from dismissal, but because nothing in the reporting structure requires it to.

As you can see, donors are optimising for a relationship with a region, whereas implementing partners are optimising for keeping a donor relationship intact. Neither is the shared outcome on the ground, and nothing in how funding or feedback moves requires either to treat it as one.

How funding structures shape decision-making on the ground

Each donor funding a partner in the same consortium brings its own templates, timelines, and indicators.

"You have USA, you have the EU, and each one of those, some of them, I think with USA, they order like almost quarterly reports, and you have other donors that do it on a six-month basis or even annual basis," Yar told us.

A coalition of major donors, including the Ford Foundation, has spent the past five years developing a common financial reporting standard, specifically because reconciling multiple incompatible formats had become unworkable for the organisations they fund.

Even a shared format only solves half of this, though. It standardises what gets submitted at the end of a cycle, but says nothing about whether a partner can see what another is doing while the project is actually running. Each partner defaults instead to the one structure they do have, their own donor's requirements, and the project never gets a common language to run on while it's happening.

The result is coordination that has to be manually rebuilt at every meeting, translated back and forth between formats that were never designed to talk to each other, rather than something partners can simply see and act on together as they go.

Trust: the hidden infrastructure of coordination

Think about the last time a partner told you something wasn't working. Did it happen while there was still time to fix it, or only once it reached the final report?

That question sits underneath everything covered so far. The feedback that never travels upward, the reporting formats with no shared view of what's actually happening, both come back to the same missing piece.

For Yar, trust in a partnership means something specific. "Shared decision-making. Transparent communication, including about failures. And honest feedback that isn't filtered through what each party thinks the other wants to hear," she told us.

Few partnerships meet that bar, and it's not hard to see why. Admitting something isn't working can read as an invitation for a donor to ask why funding should continue at all, so problems get held back rather than raised early. Add that to a reporting structure with no real-time visibility into what a partner is actually doing, and the two gaps start reinforcing each other. Nobody can see the problem, and nobody wants to be the one who names it.

So which comes first, the visibility that would make honesty safer, or the honesty that would make visibility worth building? Maybe the more useful question is whether a partnership can afford to keep treating them as separate things at all.

What needs to change for humanitarian work to be more sustainable

"In a beautiful world, you wouldn't want the same international NGOs doing the same work for the next hundred years. You'd want the local communities to be strong enough, resilient enough, and well-resourced enough to help themselves," Yar told us.

Coordination and localisation usually get treated as separate conversations, one about systems talking to each other, the other about who holds power in a partnership. But look closely, and they turn out to be the same question from two angles.

A local partner who gets to help decide, rather than simply carry out a plan handed down to them, is a partner whose view of what's happening on the ground actually counts for something, the same way visibility into the data has mattered throughout this piece, just applied here to who's in the room rather than who sees the data.

This piece has stayed with coordination and the systems behind it. What a genuinely different funding model looks like, one built around local ownership from the outset, is a bigger question than this article can hold, and deserves its own space rather than a closing thought here.

Fixing this doesn't start with better people

Donors and implementers are missing the same thing for different reasons. As Yar told us:

"Coordination needs to happen on both levels. Among donors, they need to speak to themselves, align their priorities together. And then also the implementers need to coordinate,"

For things to change, that alignment needs to exist while decisions are still being made, not afterwards, once a project is already running and a report is due. A donor deciding where to fund needs to know who else is already there. A partner delivering on the ground needs to know what another partner is doing this month, not what they did last quarter.

Neither of those things requires new goodwill, but simply a way to see each other that doesn't depend on someone remembering to ask.

That's the specific space Tactiv sits in, giving donors and implementers a shared line of sight into each other's work at both of those levels. If you've been navigating this exact gap, we would love to assist.