Designing a new decision-making model to evaluate non-governmental organizations' performance under uncertainty: A case for Türkiye

There has been a notable rise in global disaster range, occurrence, and severity in recent years. This has prompted non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide to diligently engage in life-saving and relief activities, particularly in disaster-prone regions with limited infrastructure. In this process, strategically designed and efficiently implemented initiatives by NGOs can mitigate the adverse social and economic consequences of disasters. Due to the nature of the evaluation, this research utilizes the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique to discuss NGOs' performance evaluation. Evaluating the performance of NGOs not only ensures proper planning but also provides better-organized structures to minimize future after-effects. Since evaluating performance involves various concepts and uncertainty, this research introduces a new model that utilizes integrated methodologies to asses NGOs' performance. To achieve more precise and reliable results, this study employs spherical fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (SF-AHP) to determine the criteria weights and utilizes spherical fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (SF-TOPSIS) to rank the alternatives. In this context, the proposed model evaluates six NGOs based on three main criteria and nine sub-criteria. The uniqueness of this study stems from its utilization of an integrated approach based on spherical fuzzy sets (SFS) for the first time in a case study for Türkiye, addressing the issue of evaluating the performance of NGOs under uncertainty. The results reveal that “dialog with authorities” is the most influential sub-criterion and “Alternative 4” achieves the highest overall ranking. Finally, sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the reliability of the employed methodologies.