Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)

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What Is Cluster Coordination ?

• In an inter-dependent humanitarian world, strategic approaches allow multiple agencies with diverse mandates to achieve goals collectively that could not be achieved by individual approaches alone. Clusters are the expression of that collective realization and aim to provide the “enabling environment” that allows diversity to strengthen both the effectiveness and efficiency of aid delivery.
• The Cluster Approach is the current mechanism of helping enhance the quality of humanitarian action within and across sectors. It is part of a wider reform process that seeks to confer greater predictability and accountability, while at the same time strengthening partnerships between NGOs, international organizations, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and the UN.
• Coordination to some is management to others. Managing the coordination of humanitarian action is the proactive process of realising allocative efficiencies in operational environments of scarcity, uncertainty, infrastructural collapse, market failure, competition, and often danger. It does this through:
  • Identifying and filling gaps in aid delivery
  • Avoiding duplication of effort
  • Minimising fragmentation of resources, and
  • Increasing availability of overall resources as a result
• Coordination requires:
  • Creation of an enabling environment for robust decision-making where the voice of the smallest is heard
  • Facilitation of a process that moves from information sharing to cooperation o Recognition of complementarity
  • Informal management of a formal process
  • Government endorsement
  • Valid and relevant information
  • Credibility through Honest Broking
  • Trust