Choosing the Lesser Evil

How do non-governmental humanitarian aid organizations initiate, terminate and extend their project activities? Humanitarian aid organizations regularly face difficult decisions about life and death in a context of serious time constraints which force them daily to select whom to help and whom not to help. Liesbet Heyse focuses on how humanitarian aid organizations make these decisions and provides an inside view of the decision making processes. Two NGO case studies are used as illustration - Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and Acting with Churches Together (ACT) - both of which operate in an international network and represent specific types of NGOs often found in the community. This book opens up the black box of NGO operations, provides an empirical account of organizational decision making and combines insights of organization theory and organizational decision making theory. Chapter 1 Choosing the Lesser Evil: Selecting Humanitarian Aid Projects; Part I NGO Decision Making in Theory; Chapter 2; Chapter 3 Opening the Black Box of Internal NGO Dynamics: An Organizational Decision-Making Perspective; Chapter 4 Towards the Reality of Humanitarian Aid Provision: Three Sketches of NGO Behavior; Part 2 MSF Holland Decision Making in Practice; Chapter 5 Traces of the Administrative Organization: MSF's Organizational Features; Chapter 6 Consequentiality in Aid Provision: MSF's Dominant Decision-Making Pattern; Chapter 7 Disagreement, Commitment, and Constraints: MSF's Secondary Decision-Making Patterns; Chapter 8 From Consequential to Garbage Can Decision-Making: Two Examples of MSF Aid Provision to Africa; Part III ACT Netherlands' Decision-Making in Practice; Chapter 9 The Opposite of the Administrative Organization: ACT Netherlands' Organizational Features; Chapter 10 Working With 'The Family': ACT's Dominant Decision-Making Pattern; Chapter 11 Working Outside 'The Family': ACT's Secondary Decision-making Patterns; Part IV Comparison and Conclusion; Chapter 12 Decison-Making Dynamics in MSF and ACT: Comparison and Discussion of Research Results; Chapter 13 A Look Beyond the Horizon: Identifying Steps towards Theoretical Generalization;