I think licensing would be a political nightmare, to be honest.Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon
The UN does have an agency dedicated to coordinating humanitarian assistance, OCHA. It tends to be eclipsed in peace and stabilization operations by whatever UN SRSG or PKO body has been established (such as UNAMA in the Afghan case). Moreover OCHA specializes in humanitarian assistance, not so much longer-term development.
The ideal case is that donor coordination is undertaken, even imposed, by the host country—after all, they are the ones who have to live with the long-term consequences of assistance. Of course, countries suffering from major insurgencies usually have weak governance to begin with, and lack human and technical capacities. Ministers and ministries may be biased by ethnic or political preferences, corrupt, have little sense of conditions of the rural and poor (and be reluctant to consult or listen), and/or be engaged in empire-building constant bureaucratic warfare with each other. BUT the whole point of the process is to get the locals to take eventual ownership, and all to often donors (and foreign military forces engaged in local aid efforts) short-circuit host governments in the name of short-term efficiency, with deliterious long term effects.
Effective donor coordination across multiple international organizations, NGOs, host governments, donors, and others is, I think, is less based on structures and organigrams than it is on incentives, attitudes, personalities, and leadership. All the meetings in the world won't result in harmony of effort if the participants use them as little more as an opportunity to tell each other what it is they have already decided to do. The coordination process has to benefit the participants—whether through the provision of information that wouldn't otherwise be available, access to technical support services, or whatever. It also requires human resource systems that identify the kinds of individuals that can deal with 20 people in a room, each of whom has different views, mandates and specializations, independent budgets, and personal idiosyncricies —hence Surferbeetle's apt reference to herding cats.
I'm not sure we do this very well, whether in civilian agencies or in the military. Indeed, I think in some cases the established promotion system for normal and peacetime settings might actually select the wrong kind of people—those who go by the book (even when the book is wrong, or doesn't apply), are risk averse, don't reach outside their own organization, and can spout organizational ideology better than they can examine a problem from multiple competing perspectives.
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