The EU's Humanitarian Aid Network: Explaining Aid Allocation between 2016 - 2025

The paper aims to examine the partnering trends of the European Union’s humanitarian aid network over the past decade. Considering the organizational crisis the humanitarian sector is experiencing, namely that fundings are stagnating if not decreasing alongside the increasing number of crises and their complexity, partnership has become even more crucial for humanitarian actors. This is true for institutional donors that must manage scarce funds efficiently to provide aid and alleviate suffering. This is equally true for implementing partners in the field, that for some, their financial survival depends on their partnering with institutional donors. Thus, understanding the relational ties has become increasingly important to study, academically but also societally. This article answers to the following questions: (1) What explains aid allocation between EU donors and implementing agencies between 2016 and 2025? (2) How does it evolve? Following a two-step research design applying resource exchange theory and rational choice institutionalism to develop hypotheses on factors that condition aid allocation, this paper will use (1a) a combination of Large Language Models and human coding to create node and edge lists based on a dataset of 21.220 funding contracts linking the EU and Member States with various implementing partners from 2016 to 2025. Following, (1b) Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models (TERGMs) are then utilized to explain donor – recipient relations within the EU’s humanitarian aid network over the last decade. Finally, the paper relies on (2) a qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews to provide further insights on how actors decide to partner and on what basis, based on the previous findings. This project expects that: both donors and implementing partners select their partner based on the latter’s’ means (i.e. resources or position in the network), rationales (i.e. political and geographical priorities) and structure (i.e. (de-)centralized administration). Moreover, implementing partners and donors both select each other considering their existent closeness in the network.