There are several reasons for the reliance on central planning when it comes to humanitarian action

From Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails by Christopher J. Coyne. Page 65.

The central planning of humanitarian action takes place through numerous, and oftentimes overlapping, layers of bureaucracy, ranging from national governments to local governments to NGOs, often connected to governments through funding. In each instance, humanitarian action takes place outside the market context. Goods and services are not priced for sale, and the final supplier operates as a nonprofit entity. In other words, humanitarianism is characterized by a unilateral transfer from donors to humanitarians to those in need with no exchange of money between the supplier of humanitarian assistance and the recipient.

There are several reasons for the reliance on central planning when it comes to humanitarian action. For one, in the minds of many, the notion of humanitarianism is seen as the very antithesis of markets and the profits and losses associated with market activity. Many view the selling of a service to, let alone profiting from, someone’s suffering to be morally wrong. From this standpoint humanitarianism is viewed as “selfless” as compared to the “greed” and “selfishness” associated with markets.

Second, policymakers and humanitarian practitioners often lack a basic understanding of how markets operate to coordinate activities and generate mutually beneficial outcomes to improve human welfare. In many cases, the result of this ignorance is that interventions intended to help people in the wake of crises actually end up hurting those most in need. One example of this is price-gouging laws intended to protect those already suffering from being exploited by sellers who charge a supposed “unconscionable” or “obscene” price. While the rhetoric of these laws is politically appealing, in reality they reduce the amount of goods and services available to those who are most in need because the inability to charge a higher price provides a disincentive for entrepreneurs to adapt and redirect goods to the crisis-stricken area.

Third, as noted in Part I, the state has assumed an ever-expanding role in humanitarian action. Government agencies are organized as nonprofit command-and-control bureaucracies, which means that state-led humanitarian action must be centrally planned outside of markets since this is the way that governments are designed to operate in all contexts.

Finally, a reliance on central planning in humanitarianism can be explained, in some instances, by the absence of the conditions necessary for the operation of markets. For example, large-scale above-ground markets largely were absent in Haiti even before the 2010 earthquake because the predatory government squashed the incentives for productive entrepreneurship and exchange. The result was that, in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the existence of markets to deliver goods and services was severely limited if not altogether missing.