The sustainable humanitarian supply chain design: agility, adaptability and alignment

Abstract

The sustainable humanitarian supply chain (SHSC) has been the subject of research and debate over recent years. The aim of the paper is to provide an SHSC definition, propose an SHSC structure and validate it empirically. A unique contribution of the present study is an attempt to delineate humanitarian supply chain (HSC) management from commercial supply chain management and further discuss the HSC from the point of view of sustainability. We identify three important characteristics of a HSC network: agility, adaptability and alignment, and further explore possible linkages using extant literature and interpretive structural modelling (ISM). We further test the constructs using confirmatory factor analysis. In this way we attempt to answer long-pending calls from past researchers to contribute to the existing theories of HSC and identify further research directions based on the limitations of the present study.

Keywords:

• humanitarian supply chain
• supply chain agility
• supply chain adaptability
• supply chain alignment
• ISM modelling
• regression modelling

Acknowledgements

The authors are most grateful to anonymous reviewers and the Editors of IJLRA for their constructive and helpful comments which helped to improve the presentation of the paper considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.