Multiple institutional donors: NGOs and their strategic cherry-picking of EU humanitarian funding.

This article examines how Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) select their institutional donor depending on their humanitarian project. NGOs, amongst a variety of humanitarian actors, collaborate with various institutional donors to implement aid in the field in response to climate and man-made crises. The EU’s humanitarian aid architecture offers a dichotomic choice between two distinct funding opportunities for these same NGOs: the EU Commission (through DG ECHO) and/or the EU member states. Indeed, member states, while delegating humanitarian aid management to DG ECHO, maintain their respective national programs. Although one would expect that institutional donors solely select their implementing partners, the reverse is also true: NGOs select their institutional donors with whom they collaborate with, depending on the project or crisis. This article answers thus to the following questions: Why do NGOs opt for a cherry-picking strategy towards institutional donors? On which basis do NGOs cherry-pick their institutional donor? A comparison of six cases composed of three NGOs (Solidarités internationales, Save the Children and Care) in two different crises (Afghanistan and Yemen) relied on semi-structured interviews combined with a quantitative analysis of selected NGOs’ funding relationships. Counterbalancing the dominant literature focusing on donors, the article finds that NGOs cherry-pick institutional donors’ based on the latter’s’ means (i.e. level of control), rationales (i.e. political priorities) and structure (i.e. (de-)centralized administration). Moreover, NGOs select donors depending on the content of their projects in line with donors’ preferences and rationales. Finally, the article also discovers that NGOs use salami tactics, navigating through the funding architecture by slicing their projects into different parts catered for different donors.