Sustainable humanitarian supply chain management: exploring new theory

Kunz, Nathan; Gold, Stefan

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 conceptualize 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.

Citation

Kunz, N., & Gold, S. (in press). Sustainable humanitarian supply chain management: exploring new theory. International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, https://doi.org/10.1080/13675567.2015.1103845

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 30, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Nov 2, 2015
• Deposit Date: Apr 28, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 28, 2016
• Journal: International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications
• Print ISSN: 1367-5567
• Electronic ISSN: 1367-5567
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13675567.2015.1103845
• Keywords: Supply chain management, humanitarian logistics, sustainability, disaster rehabilitation, government, case studies
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/767601
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13675567.2015.1103845
• Additional Information: The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, 2015 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13675567.2015.1103845