Humanitarian Information Exchange Network: Why Do International Humanitarian Organizations Collaborate?

While in recent years research has highlighted the rise of inter-organizational collaboration among organizations in the nonprofit sector and has documented issues related to forming and maintaining of these relationships, there is little known about inter-organizational humanitarian information exchange and especially the motives of collaboration. In this paper, we examine collaboration relationships among organizations member of a community of interest in humanitarian information exchange. We use the social network block-model method to analyze collaboration network data collected from 35 international organizations. Six strongly connected clusters are identified in the community. Evaluating reported reasons for these collaborations, we find that the two main motivations are related to relational characteristics of organizations, which interestingly are the most and least reported reasons in two of the most densely connected clusters of relationships. These findings are discussed through the lenses of resource dependency and network structural equivalence.