Page "Internally displaced person" Paragraph 53

As some have pointed out, one of the most flagrant problems of the collaborative response was that “ abnegation of responsibility is possible because there is no formal responsibility apportioned to agencies under the Collaborative Response, and thus no accountability when agencies renege on their promises .” The cluster approach – the successor to the collaborative approach-tried to do away with this problem by designating individual agencies as ‘ sector leaders ’ to coordinate operations in specific areas to try to plug those newly identified gaps.

The cluster approach was conceived amid concerns about coordination and capacity that arose from the weak operational response to the crisis in Darfur in 2004 and 2005, and the critical findings of the Humanitarian Response Review ( HRR ) commissioned by the then ERC, Jan Egeland.

Egeland called for strengthening leadership of the sectors, and introduced the concept of " clusters ” at different levels ( headquarters, regional, country and operational )’.