Qualitative interviews with managers in human rights NGOs (n=36), conservation organisations (n=44), and churches and mission agencies (n=30) about practices of prioritization. Our research aimed to address the following questions: How do these organizations allocate resources to specific areas, and specific groups of beneficiaries and specific types of activities? What are the time-frames of allocating resources, measuring results, and managing staff and partners? What are knowledge-claims involved and how are these resolved? What is the role of ideas? What moral dilemmas arise for actors involved in these decisions and how do they manage these dilemmas? In the past decades, value-led organisations and networks have assumed a greater role in processes of governance - that is in processes that affect the distribution of material and symbolic resources. "Triaging Values" investigates the ways in which managers in such organisations make decisions about how to allocate resources, and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people and specific territorial units through in-depth interviews. Value-driven organisations face the problem of triage in specific ways, as values usually do not lend themselves easily to prioritisation. Pragmatic decisions about effectiveness usually involve complex knowledge-claims about the world and the effects of intervention within it, and criteria for success in non-profits defy easy calculation. This study focuses on human rights organisations, Christian churches and conservation organisations, all organisations that pursue particularly boundless values. The project investigates how ideas, management tools, controversies about knowledge and organisational constraints affect provision. It contributes to debates about global governance, and it seeks to offer new understandings of how territoriality and space is managed by non-state organisations.

We conducted interviews with managers in human rights NGOs, conservation NGOs and Zoos and churches and mission agencies to explore how they make decisions about resource allocation. We focused on these sets of organisations because they all subscribe to universalist sets of values. Respondents from a diverse set of organisations within each field (Human rights, environmental organisations, Christian churches and mission agencies) were approached via email. Organisations were sampled to include large and prominent organisations as well as smaller ones different along a range of axis of differentiation, such as different countries, different sizes and different specializations and forms of expertise. Interviews were conducted in person whereever possible or via skype. Interviews lasted for about one hour each. Interviews were tape-recorded with permission whenever possible. Questions were open-ended and targeted organisational routines and practices involved in resource allocation. We probed for examples wherever possible.