One observation from an adjacent world: absorption capacity is treated here as a new and poorly understood problem, but it’s a mature discipline in the multilateral, development and humanitarian ecosystems. Surge absorption has been studied and managed there for decades, with identified tools and processes—eg absorptive-capacity assessments before scale-up, phased disbursement tied to implementation rates, pooled funds that spread money across implementers when no single organisation can absorb it, and monitoring systems that flag when spending outruns capacity.
The failure modes you list (unnatural growth, rushed strategy, hiring ahead of funding that doesn’t materialise, and plus, corruption) are also well documented there, from post-tsunami aid to large global health scale-ups. We know from experience that absorption fails at the organisational level before it fails at the field level; phased growth outperforms step-change growth; and reversibility (“two-way doors”) is exactly the right design principle.
So I’d add one suggestion to your four: the sector doesn’t need to derive this knowledge from first principles. There are many practitioners with extensive (decades-long) of experience planning, budgeting and disbursing at the scale you are concerned about. As one example, the budget of the Syria Humanitarian Needs and Response plan for 2026 is $2.9b, covering health, education, food security, water and sanitation. The experience of these practitioners who have disbursed at billion-dollar scale through these exact dynamics is currently almost invisible to this ecosystem. Importing that expertise seems cheaper than re-learning the hard lessons.
Thanks Morgan, this is a valuable perspective.
One observation from an adjacent world: absorption capacity is treated here as a new and poorly understood problem, but it’s a mature discipline in the multilateral, development and humanitarian ecosystems. Surge absorption has been studied and managed there for decades, with identified tools and processes—eg absorptive-capacity assessments before scale-up, phased disbursement tied to implementation rates, pooled funds that spread money across implementers when no single organisation can absorb it, and monitoring systems that flag when spending outruns capacity.
The failure modes you list (unnatural growth, rushed strategy, hiring ahead of funding that doesn’t materialise, and plus, corruption) are also well documented there, from post-tsunami aid to large global health scale-ups. We know from experience that absorption fails at the organisational level before it fails at the field level; phased growth outperforms step-change growth; and reversibility (“two-way doors”) is exactly the right design principle.
So I’d add one suggestion to your four: the sector doesn’t need to derive this knowledge from first principles. There are many practitioners with extensive (decades-long) of experience planning, budgeting and disbursing at the scale you are concerned about. As one example, the budget of the Syria Humanitarian Needs and Response plan for 2026 is $2.9b, covering health, education, food security, water and sanitation. The experience of these practitioners who have disbursed at billion-dollar scale through these exact dynamics is currently almost invisible to this ecosystem. Importing that expertise seems cheaper than re-learning the hard lessons.
https://reliefweb.int/attachments/28e3e5cb-a476-44ee-9cb7-f69625bdf31a/syrian_arab_republic_2026_humanitarian_needs_and_response_plan.pdf