Choosing the Lesser Evil: Understanding Decision Making in Humanitarian Aid NGOs

This book is one of few that opens up the black box of NGO operations, provides an empirical account of organizational decision making and combines insights of organizational decision-making theory and organization theory. The central question in this book is how 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 to daily select whom to help and whom not to help. Heyse focuses on how humanitarian aid organizations make these kind of decisions and provides an inside view of the decision-making processes. Two NGO case studies are used as illustration: Medecins sans Frontieres (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 is one of few that opens up the black box of NGO operations, provides an empirical account of organizational decision making and combines insights of organizational decision-making theory and organization theory.