International intervention, be it with the aim of emergency relief, peace­building or development aid, often involves such a multitude of actors that it is hard to get an overview.

The intervention machinery is sustained by an amazing number of organisations. Intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) with their various separate agencies, a skyrocketing number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and government agencies are present on the ground in crises zones to distribute food, organise elec­tions, or reform the police.

Organising this ‘Babylon’ of actors has become an issue of increasing concern which is discussed by scholars and practitioners under the heading ‘coordination problem’. The term coordination refers to the attempt to bring together disparate actors in order to make their work more effective. At the heart of coordination are three types of activities: sharing of infor­mation, sharing of resources, and joint action (Brinkerhoff and Crosby 2002, 117-119). The coordination problem, in turn, refers to the lack of these activities, which is seen to lead to a host of unwanted effects such as the duplication of services or the inefficient use of resources. While the topic of inter-organisational coordination has for a long time been on the

agenda, urgent calls for more and better coordination have become wide­spread and are increasingly invoked in a ritualised manner, like a sacred formula. However, putting coordination into practice still seems to be dif­ficult, and the declared aim of more coordination contrasts with the lack of its implementation.

Several works have tried to understand the reasons behind successful or failed coordination, applying various concepts from organisation theory (cf. Jones 2002; Paris 2009; Herrhausen 2009; Gillmann 2010). This chapter seeks to contribute to that debate by interpretatively exploring the coordination problem in intervention. To do so, the chapter builds on sociological institutionalism of the so-called Stanford School.¹ The chap­ter starts from the bewildering myriad of organisations in contemporary crises and poses the following question: why is coordination so widely supported but seldom implemented?

The central argument put forward here is that the coordination problem reflects more fundamental political conflicts that are, however, disguised by the principle of coordination. The reason for that is that coordina­tion has become an institutionalised rule or ‘rationalised myth’ which is embedded in an institutional environment (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Scott and Meyer 1994).² All actors have to support the principle of coordi­nation for reasons of legitimacy.

The chapter is structured as follows: In the first section, starting from the theoretical understanding of ‘rationalised myths’ in sociological insti­tutionalism, I develop my central argument that the dense institutional space of intervention is conducive to the rise of the ‘rationalised myth of coordination’. The next section seeks to provide empirical evidence for this thesis by analysing organisational interactions and their effects as they can be observed in current crisis zones of the Global South. It starts with mapping the interveners and their coordination problem and then outlining persistent obstacles to coordination, namely four typical political conflicts. This is followed by tracing the rise of the myth of coordination in the official statements of major international actors as well as its manifesta­tion in coordinating institutions. I then turn to the case of Albania, where the norm of donor-to-government coordination is widely endorsed in the realm of public sector reform, but decoupled from the actual practice of coordination in the face of the persistent problem of ‘policy slippage’. The final section discusses the implications of the empirical findings.