Designing Sustainable Humanitarian Supply Chains

Helen S.Y. Chen

No m82ar, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: This is a multidisciplinary study on operationalizing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in humanitarian operations through supply chain management methods. It is motivated by the belief that for SDGs to be pursued in humanitarian operations, they need to be contextualized in the idiosyncratic settings and approached systematically. Towards this end, this paper develops and operationalizes a strategic sustainable humanitarian supply chain framework using the design science approach. The study starts with analyzing the humanitarian operations characteristics and identifying the critical supply chain capabilities required for sustainable operations. It then re-conceptualizes sustainability in the humanitarian context and proposes a formula of sustainability performance in humanitarian operations. After that, the humanitarian supply chain structural components are delineated and decomposed into operational elements in order to identify the configurations that lead to optimal sustainability performance. The findings then converge into a framework to enable the identification of context-contingent sustainable supply chain strategies in humanitarian operations. This paper makes three contributions to SDG research: 1) it contextualizes sustainability in the humanitarian setting through postulating the concept and formula of net sustainability value as the single bottom line in humanitarian operations; 2) it increases operationality of SDGs in the humanitarian sector through the design of a strategic framework for sustainable humanitarian supply chains; and 3) it increases the interdisciplinarity of SDG research by using a generic supply chain framework that can be applied to integrate multilevel multidisciplinary sustainability studies.

Date: 2020-05-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:m82ar

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/m82ar

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