Sustainable humanitarian supply chain management – exploring new theory

ABSTRACT

Disaster response operations aim at helping as many victims as possible in the shortest time, with limited consideration of the socio-economic context. During the disaster rehabilitation phase, the perspective needs to broaden and comprehensively take into account the local environment. We propose a framework of sustainable humanitarian supply chain management (SCM) that facilitates such comprehensive performance. We conceptualise the framework by combining literature from the fields of sustainable and humanitarian SCM. We test the framework through an analytic induction process by means of multiple case studies of four relief organisations. Our framework suggests that supply chain design needs to be aligned not only to relief organisations’ enablers, but also to the population's long-term requirements as well as any socio-economic and governmental contingency factors. A good fit between these dimensions leads to sustainable performance. The framework provides an instrument for relief organisations to achieve sustainable performance in the disaster rehabilitation phase.

KEYWORDS:

• Supply chain management
• humanitarian logistics
• sustainability
• disaster rehabilitation
• government
• case studies

ORCID

Nathan Kunz http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2631-6401

Stefan Gold http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9945-742X

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 143578] and the University of Neuchâtel.