"Those experiencing humanitarian crises have a view that Western NGOs can be intrusive and insensitive," warns Dr. Randolph Kent, Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College, London.

 "Increasingly, over the past three decades or so, humanitarian organisations from the international community have become accustomed to intervening in 'overseas crises' in ways that are seen in many instances as intrusive and disempowering.  So, regional governments will be less amenable to such intrusive intervention in the future - no matter how well intentioned."

 Dr. Kent says external organisations will need to pay greater attention to non-intrusive support and he advocates non-intrusive means for international support.

 "When Western agencies rolled up after the Sichuan earthquake in China, the Chinese told them flatly they were not needed. Generally, greater sensitivity to regional culture, gaining real knowledge of what is wanted by governments and communities in disaster-prone regions and building contacts in those regions well before another humanitarian disaster, is the way in which the West can continue to play an international humanitarian role  - rather than the presumption that it is wanted and needed."

 Randolph Kent says he would not single out particular aid agencies as having been particularly intrusive but as an example of what is seen as intrusion, he recalls a discussion with a Haitian government official who said that within three days of the Haiti earthquake, more than 400 Western NGOs had descended without a single one making contact with the Haitian authorities.

"A hegemony or sense of tradition has developed over decades in the Western humanitarian movement, that it should spearhead response to disasters because it has special experience and ability. But increasingly we are seeing more and more humanitarian players from the east responding to disasters - India, China, Vietnam and Bangladesh as examples, are more than capable of responding and managing crises in their own countries."

 Dr. Kent calls for the creation of non-intrusive means for international support and urges greater emphasis on the means for sharing best prac tices and standards.

 "We need to find ways to share data on regional dimensions of vulnerability on a consistent and systematic basis; there should also be regionally developed scenario exercises to assess and test appropriate approaches for international support for regional crises and, wherever possible, efforts should be made to agree on pre-response arrangements between relevant regional bodies and international counterparts.  Western humanitarian experts need to begin to develop relationships with their Eastern counterparts long before a disaster hits and when it his there is an established process for lending assistance."