This article examines the frequently cited argument that coordination issues in humanitarian relief can be addressed more effectively with greater centralized authority and argues for a new conceptualization of aid delivery. The former position suggests a hierarchical, top-down view of the humanitarian relief theater, while this analysis contends that the relief implementation structure may be better conceived as consisting of a network of loosely coupled semiautonomous organizations (Weick, 1976). A network approach allows examination of aid coordination dynamics at multiple levels of analysis: individual (professional and personal), organizational and interorganizational (operational), and strategic (structural/contextual). So viewed, factors that influence relief delivery, including contextual or strategic conditions and organization-scale concerns, may either encourage or dissuade coordination across institutional boundaries. We argue that trust is a key precondition to coordination and that its extension is in turn conditioned by a number of strategic and operating-level factors. We concentrate on operational coordination, as strategic concerns are not often open to the control of lone organizational actors. Our analysis rests in part on in-depth interviews (each consisted of open-ended questions and lasted an average of ninety to one hundred minutes) with a small sample of experienced international nongovernmental organization relief professionals who were engaged in aid efforts in Kosovo following the 1999 intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in that region.
