Non-governmental humanitarian organizations not only deliver the overwhelming majority of the foreign assistance given by governments to countries in crisis, in many of those countries they also comprise the primary source of information upon which international actors base their understanding of the crisis and their policy decisions. This research examines the NGOs' informal and largely unrecognized role as ground-level information sources and technical advisers of governments. It hypothesizes that the unique characteristics of this community - its operational role, media visibility, and its complex, symbiotic relationship with governments - lends it an important independent impact on policy formation, but one that derives primarily from the organizations' informational and advisory functions rather than their value-based advocacy efforts. The paper describes how in complex emergency scenarios NGO information and framing of events have centralized humanitarian concerns and influenced government and intergovernmental policy responses. The case studies of Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo seek to make evident how US policy responses were driven, and in large part shaped, by information and implicit prescriptions from humanitarian NGOs. Through field-level situation reporting to the donor agency, which is then fed up to the senior levels of the US government, this humanitarian information and framing has both helped to impel a political response, and to influence the form that response has taken, though, paradoxically, often in ways contrary to humanitarian interests.
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