Sustainable humanitarian supply chain management–exploring new theory

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-4-2017

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.

Publication Title

International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications

Volume

20

Issue

2

First Page

85

Last Page

104

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1080/13675567.2015.1103845

ISSN

13675567

E-ISSN

1469848X

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