Humanitarian logistics & supply chain management: building a community through shared research podcast

Transcript

Mental health and higher education

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Daniel Ridge (DR): The Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management has recently hit a major milestone, its 10 year anniversary, which it celebrated with a special issue. At the same time, Emerald Publishing has agreed to a multi-year deal with the Kühne foundation to flip the journal to fully open access beginning in 2023. This means that the journal will become freely available to readers all over the world who will no longer hit a subscription paywall, and authors will be able to publish their Open Access articles for free.

To discuss the field of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management and the 10-year anniversary, I'm joined by the journal’s editors.

Hi, my name is Gyöngyi Kovács. I'm one of the co-editors of the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management.

Hi, my name is Nezih Altay and I'm the other co-editor for the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management.

We are also joined by Sean Rafter, the managing director of HELP logistics, a program of the Kühne Foundation.

So JHLSCM recently hit a major milestone having reached his 10-year anniversary, which is a really big accomplishment. Before we dive into our discussion about the special issue that covered the anniversary, I think it'd be good for our listeners who are not familiar with the journal to tell them a little bit about, first of all, the discipline, what is humanitarian logistics and the humanitarian supply chain, and how the journal fits into the larger picture of the field?

Nezih Altay (NA): The journal is the only dedicated academic journal to this topic. And in general, we are method agnostic. So, we publish mathematical modelling optimization papers, survey papers, conceptual papers, theoretical papers, as long as they contribute to the theory and practice. Those two things are equally important for us contribution that theory and contribution to practice, because we do have actually a lot of practitioner readers. And we even have a separate type of paper that we routinely publish in our journal that we call Practice Forum, which are papers written by practitioners for practitioners. But since this is an academic journal, and not all practitioners are familiar with, you know, academic writing, we usually recommend the practitioner to join forces with an academic so that the paper fits to the academic writing and to the academic journal. My shot at what is humanitarian logistics, what is humanitarian supply chains, from my perspective, any logistical operation, any supply chain operation that helps alleviate human suffering, can be considered humanitarian logistics or humanitarian supply chain management.

Gyöngyi Kovács (GK): We have recognized that there is a bit of a vacuum in other supply chain management journals, looking at this particular context. And with the context, I mean, what Nezih just said, but also generally speaking, like emergencies, crises, disasters, conflicts, so any kind of really, areas where you deliver from a logistical perspective, you do have supply chains, you have to have suppliers, and you have to have all the logistical principles in place just to be able to alleviate that human suffering. So, this context is a real big one, it's also you can possibly also call it an industry. It's not an industry that is very much considered in the typical supply chain management journals. And we heard the need that there needs to be some space and some kind of outlet and channel where it's easy to find what research is being done in this area, and that it is easy to communicate both with other researchers, but also with practitioners to say, what are the newest insights, what have you done? What are the newest results in this research? Where does the field go to be more effective in also actually making a change?

DR: So, a lot of what you've done then is to build a community around humanitarian logistics, is that right?

GK: Yes. And in that sense, I mean, the journal has come out from a long way of building that community. The community has taught it a little bit with the research community when it comes to this particular journal, which very quickly became a global research community. But this is where it's very important. There was a [Illegible] to come in having also extended this to the practitioner community to make this the voice of this field.

DR: Sean, what would you like to add?

Sean Rafter (SR): Thank you, Gyöngyi. And Nezih for these answers. And I think it demonstrates very well how the definition of humanitarian logistics is evolving at a very fast pace. Having worked in the sector for a decade, and now working with academia through publications. is like the journal really seeing an evolution of what humanitarian logistics means. And I would go as far to say that it's a humanitarian supply chain delivers life-saving products and services to the benefit of humanity. And I say humanity, because I think it now expands to include climate and environment because sustainable supply chains are entwined now in the work of humanitarian supply chains. It has to be life-saving. That's the humanitarian imperative. But there are, as Gyöngyi said, so many principles of do no harm, ensuring child protection in the upstream downstream of supply chains. It's a really complex environment. And the definition is really quite expansive.

DR: Well Sean, how does Kuhne foundation and Help Logistics fit into the ecosystem of humanitarian supply chain or, you know, more specifically, its relationship to the journal?

SR: So HELP Logistics was founded to support the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian supply chains. The foundation, its parent, recognized that work needed to be done there, we saw that the commercial supply chain was advanced in many areas. And we could see that academia and commercial supply chains had a lot to offer in terms of improving the way we were doing things in the humanitarian logistics sector. And my own experience in that is I started working in the field, way back in, in early 2000s, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a field logistician, and as I developed and worked through many different positions in different countries, what I was really desperate for, and I had come from, I was an engineer and an IT specialist. And I had the discipline of critical thinking and analytics. But what I needed was models, methods that could be applied to the field that I could grasp and understand and apply. And that was really a huge gap. And so as a came out of the humanitarian sector and started working with academia, I could see that there is so much information and so much interesting data on trends and the different solutions that could be applied, that it became kind of a passion of mine to try to bring this academia and commercial sector knowledge into the humanitarian sector. And so HELP logistics has been working at the intersection of these sectors, since about seven, eight years, and the journal has always been close to us in that period. And I really want to find a way to get this journal into the hands of field logisticians as I was over a decade ago, because there's a real hunger for good academic research that is applied and useful in context.

DR: Emerald Publishing just made an extraordinary agreement with the Kune Foundation. I was wondering if you could tell us more about that.

SR: Yeah, this is the summation of many years of working with the journal and wanting to find a way to make it open source. One of the issues which we all recognize is that there are barriers, academic barriers for field workers to get access to research. And we wanted to try and break down those barriers. And because the journal has that content, but the model of getting it out to field workers was challenging, we decided to fund this journal for three years starting in 2023. And make it open access and it has a twofold purpose one, it will reduce the barriers and make it fully accessible to everybody in the world, and especially to local logisticians, and we talk a lot about localization and empowering local NGOs and their workers. So this will enable them to get their hands on the journal every year. And the other point is that we want to be also encourage local universities and practitioners working in the field to come forward and publish their work. We recognize that a lot of publications at the moment are coming from the same universities, same professors, and we really want to expand that field and encourage other universities and local organizations and practitioners to put forward their ideas. If we can help and support them, and guide them through the process of publishing, we really hope that we can move the dial a little bit and the conversation and give have a voice to be able to publish and be heard on different stages, and especially through the journal. I think that's very possible.

DR: So this is really going back to the community building, isn't it?

SR: Absolutely, yeah. And it's expanding that community and expanding it out from the traditional universities. And you know, even for me, I'm not an academic, I'm very grateful for the information and experience I gained from working with Gyöngyi for expanding my understanding of how academia works, when I'm in a lucky position to be able to understand that there are many who struggle to understand the first step in being able to publish their work. And we really want to try and reach out to them because it's a huge community out there.

GK: I think it's really important that the journal is becoming now open and free access. And what we get now is release three supportive health and Kune foundation, it cannot be overstated. Basically, it's really super important that people have access to it, that they can read it, they can contribute to it, we will never have that global impact unless we would have that open access both to authors, but also to the field. Generally, we do get submissions to the journal from all around the world. But we need to still get better at bringing in the voices and the particular issues of the context of all around the world. We don't have enough publications from all around the world. Partly, this is a matter of course of the possibilities that scholars have somewhere, even what they can read, or what they can write and how much they have the chance to do research. But partly, it's just to make sure that they find the right outlets that we can help them. And here, we've done a very developmental way of supporting authors through the review process. And I know that Nezih has been especially focusing on making sure that we are very, very constructive in our reviews as well.

NA: We do have a constructive approach. We don't necessarily try to reject papers so that we have a lower acceptance rate. But we try to build papers up so that we have high quality good papers that contribute to theory and practice.

DR: Well, over the last year in build up to the journal going full open access, the journal has been publishing virtual issues. So right now, you know, in light of COVID, there's the virtual issue Preparing the Humanitarian Supply Chain for Epidemics and Pandemic Response. And there's currently also the virtual special issue for the 2022 Euro Hope conference. So it's hoping that Gyöngyi you could talk a little bit about these virtual issues and what maybe some of the goals are with putting them together.

GK: The virtual issues have been extremely helpful of bringing together topical issues that otherwise would not be that easy to find. So for example, then at the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, we had several virtual issues, in fact that first brought together what we already knew about pandemics and epidemics. Then the next one about the first initial results from our research about this particular pandemic, and then so forth. These have been incredibly useful to the community. They've also been very useful for just easily finding what is out there already on something. There has also been a very good virtual issue area, for example, on conflict and displacement, which was also very timely, and I'm very appreciate their Emerald support and being that timely, because we could pretty much overnight, when the evacuation was going on from Afghanistan put together that special issue to make sure that people could instantly find easily the latest results that there have been about displacement related issues. We continue to do so these kinds of virtual issues are typically very topical, typically very timely, and that is what we also hope to achieve with that.

DR: I'd like to turn now to the 10th anniversary special issue. So Nezih and Gyöngyi along with Karen Spens co authored an article titled The Evolution of humanitarian logistics as a discipline through a crystal ball. So you know, over the years, there have been various literature reviews of the subject. But in your article, you take a different approach to the evolution of the discipline. So, can you tell us about this approach and what you found?

GK: What is maybe different in our approach to the typical literature review is that we actually went through a number of practitioner events and collected also like what was being discussed amongst humanitarian logistics practitioners. We took that both the lens okay what is there already in literature that we know that there is and what is what are the gaps and what are maybe the upcoming in new topics that we would otherwise not find if he would not go to this practitioner events. So that's the difference maybe?

NA: That's exactly right, Gyöngyi. The traditional literature review paper looks at what has been published, it looks backwards, and identifies gaps in what has been published already. And, you know, puts out those gaps, basically, as a future research direction. We wanted to change that logic. And we wanted to see what's happening in practice right now, what are the problems that practitioners are discussing, and what the academics did not do any research on yet on the problems that are being discussed? So it's more practice oriented, it's more forward looking rather than backward looking. It's not a literature review anymore, because we're not necessarily looking backwards. But it does open new research directions that hasn't been thought by academics before?

DR: Well, that's what I really appreciated about the article, the practical, real world aspect of it, the forward looking aspect of it, because, you know, we've gone through COVID, just recently, but you know, the humanitarian supply chain is directly affected by global events, you know, whether they're natural disasters, or human ones. And in the article, you offer a framework of global events and how they cascade. Can you tell us about this framework, how you conceptualize it, and then how you use it yourself and your research?

GK: The framework actually looks at a number of different interesting issues that are not just solely just pertaining to humanitarian logistics as a discipline, but also like, you know, what else triggers events. Or what are the bigger kinds of things that we can see. So, for example, we do begin in how climate change might be a factor that triggers migration, or that triggers any kinds of disasters by itself and that then triggers migration, and how those kinds of aspects will have an impact on what we have to look at and be in the world, we need to deliver humanitarian aid, and the ability to see, for example, people are migrating towards. So what we're trying to do, generally speaking in the framework, is to open up the bigger picture to say like, okay, what are these outstanding factors that we can see? And how will they impact on the future and evolution of needs in this field, and that, they can always on how they shall respond to these needs in the future?

DR: Well in the 10th anniversary special issue there are several really important articles. Do you think you could tell us about some of them?

NA: The our goal with that was to mimic the first issue of the journal. And so we reached out to the authors who published in the first ever issue of the journal, and we wanted to ask them, you know, can you write an article, you know, looking back to the first issue and looking at now and what has changed? And in which direction are we going? And these authors are authors from the first issue, they touch different issues within the humanitarian logistics and supply chain management, community or field. You know, some actually, some of our authors come from military background. So they were looking at civil military partnerships. Some of our authors come from a humanitarian logistics or disaster response, life-saving operations angle, and some of our authors approach the problem from a development angle. The importance of the 10th anniversary issue, I think, it allows us to see the difference between what we were doing 10 years ago, and what what we are doing now and what we expect to do in the in the near future.

GK: It was really nice to have exactly this proposal from the other authors to say like they look back to the first initial thoughts about humanity and logistics. Now mind you, these are all people who didn't just 10 years ago work in this field, but continue to work in this field. And they looked back, but they also looked forward. So it was very nice to see that and to kind of bridge that gap like okay, what has happened in 10 years, and a lot has happened in 10 years, the field of humanitarian logistics has very much matured, there is so much more research out there. This very journal has been fundamentally important to hold the discipline or has managed to kind of bring people together and to learn from one another. So we could say that it has been quite a success story in that sense that we have brought the researchers together, but also that there has been a lot done and we've managed to influence practice to a large extent and there has been really like an impact of the research that we've had.

DR: Sean what would you like to add?

SR: The global logistics cluster which is responsible for the community of humanitarian practitioners from the United Nations to the IFRC to international NGOs convenes twice a year. And a few years ago, we managed to convince them to have a marketplace for academia. And so they gave up one of their three days, in order to listen to many professors, and researchers who talked about the research. And it was remarkable, from the skeptical point of view from the beginning to the complete change in attitude afterwards, that the relevancy and timeliness of research, the clock speed at which research is now coming out, as Gyöngyi, as you said earlier, relevant to ongoing operations is is really shortened. And we couldn't actually close those sessions on time, because people wanted to engage in further conversation, go deeper into the papers. And we've run those marketplace now, subsequently, every year. And we still get called back, you know, to sponsor and provide more professors and more papers to talk about with the global and regional practitioners in in the humanitarian cluster.

GK: Yeah, we've also built a cluster, for example, in some of their latest meetings, we had a chance to highlight some of the best and the latest research from the journal. And we could invite authors to do that themselves. And to say, like, Okay, this is what I've done. And these are the main results here. And it was very, very well received. So the journal itself has now communication with practitioners in that sense, going. One thing that has always been super important to this journal is that we want to have articles that have both rigor and relevance. And I know this is something that logistics and supply chain management, as a field always says, but I think in this journal, and with the way that we've been doing this pivotal cluster with reaching out of practitioners working in partnerships with academia and practitioners, we've pretty much come a long way in managing to do so as well.

SR: I've read a recent paper in the Emerald journal. And what's really interesting is that academia is able to step back. Well, I think it is closer now to understanding humanitarian operations than ever before, and retains the ability to be able to have a perspective from slightly outside as well. And that means it's able to encapsulate a lot of the complexity and ambiguity and uncertainty within supply chain and offer some pathways through that and able to condense very complex problems. And it's, it's really so important to have that those speeds, you know, we know operations is all about delivery. But having somebody observe the sector and provide insight is really important. And that recent paper spoke a lot about the convergence that is going on within the sector, the convergence of stakeholders, from humanitarian and commercial and academia sectors to come together to solve problems towards the SDGs convergence on technology and the utilization of technologies across different sectors to solve problems, he convergence of disciplines and how we bring humanitarian and sustainability together. This kind of academic perspective of not being afraid of complexity, but helping to unpack it, and then allow humanitarian operations to use it is really useful.

NA: The paper Sean is talking about is actually available right now in our early cite section on the journal’s website. And one thing that I wanted to add is as an example of that convergence and the low cluster meetings, you know, the fact that we have now a day, you know, within the local cluster meetings, that's a two-way street. The logisticians are learning from academicians, but we are also getting new, interesting research ideas in those meetings, listening to the logisticians. As a matter of fact, we are now working on, Gyöngyi and I are working on a project that looks at the interface of humanitarian logistics and, and law and legal structures in the world because humanitarians you know, when they're moving stuff from point A to point B, they are constrained by, you know, global and local customs, structures, local laws, employment laws, etc, etc. And how they navigate these legal structures and still deliver on time and at a low cost and all that stuff is very interesting and that that actually came directly that idea came directly from the practitioners.

DR: So one of the values that we hold dear at Emerald Publishing is that we want the research that we publish to have a real world impact. And it sounds like you guys are really talking about that. So I'm wondering if maybe you have some specific examples of this relationship between academia, and practitioners, people who are out on the field working.

GK: A lot of researchers in this field, always other practitioners every now and then. Many are on rosters of humanitarian organizations, they can be deployed into different crises and emergencies. And they do that and come back with the knowledge with the application, of the insights and so forth. Others we're going to do strategic level they but they also come in and observe how humanity and organization works, or how a particular disaster is being responded to. So, we do have many great examples of how relevance can also just kind of be brought in and made sure that we all understand what what is actually current and important to humanitarian organizations as well. We have multiple examples otherwise, as well. I mean, if you really think just very recently, pandemic virtual issues that you mentioned, there has been so much there, humanity and logistics has been actually the field that other industries looked at saying like, Okay, you deal with supply chain disruptions on a daily basis. So how do what do we learn from you? How shall we actually implement the knowledge from humanity and supply chains in any kind of other industry to deal with a pandemic? So it's, in a way kind of the pandemic, maybe it was a turning around for us, because we, we've always been kind of seen as humanitarian logistics is with different and now and human logistics, we'll be learning from industry, I think it's now also going both ways, and different industries are learning from the community and context as well.

DR: Well, much of what we've been discussing is where we are now with humanitarian logistics, and then looking back at the last 10 years from the beginning of the journal. Now, when you look to the future, how do you see the discipline evolving? What areas of the field do you think needs to be further developed and explored?

NA: One of the areas that we need to further develop is the intersection of logistics operations with other fields. I think we have been focusing on, you know, movement of goods and procurement of goods, which are typical logistics and supply chain operations. But we didn't do a good job so far looking at the intersection of supply chain management and logistics operations with other fields. I think we still need to explore continuing on the idea of the paper Sean was mentioning before the convergence of stakeholders, I think we still need to explore there's a lot to do still, in terms of partnerships. In terms of convergence of stakeholders.

SR: I was thinking three areas. And one topic, I think is around supply chain management, the leadership and management of supply chain, it has improved, as Gyöngyi said over the last decade, but I think there's still a way to go to understand the different business models that apply to the humanitarian sector, we have evolved in a very organic way, since you know, the 80s. And changing the institutions, and changing the ways we work I think needs to be looked into. So leadership and organization management and models would be one area, I think would be interesting to explore. And then I think not just in the operational delivery part, the humanitarian operations part, but in preparedness and resilience, so the Build Back Better or the Do No Harm principles, we know there is less funding or less capital available, and there are greater needs. And so doing more with less is imperative. And so being able to prepare better for emergencies, whether that is models on how to optimize preparedness, prepositioning with inventory management, etc. I think this would be an area to look into. And then the last one for me would be the emergence of sustainability and environment and the impact it's had on humanitarian operations. And really the need to look at the full lifecycle of supply chain and understand its impact, its carbon footprint, waste management. What's really fascinating about this area that is it has accelerated a lot more conversation because this is an emerging area where all sectors are affected. And there's a really huge growth in in forums and groups and communities coming out around sustainability. And by default that that's bringing humanitarian operations closer together as well.

DR: Gyöngyi, what would you like to add?

GK: Let me start with saying that I agree with both what Nezih and Sean have said, I mean, overall interdisciplinarity is that also the way the specific topics, I mean, my favourite topic, personally is also about sustainability and humanitarian aid, partly also because we need to break through this whole cycle of just thinking about, okay, climate change impacts on us. And we react to that and whatever disaster comes out of it is a reaction to that and leading up to the disasters, and instead really thinking okay, so how do we or serves mitigate climate change? What can we do to keep emissions low, and to keep global warming low? So I think the humanitarian sector really needs to think about their own role in this and thinking about that. But there are other things as well. I mean, now, I'm thinking about things like systemic change, we've been talking a lot about cash-based initiatives earlier. And they have come a long way from that, to just considered at which point to really deliver items and then do deliver certain services and then to deliver cash. And what does that mean for beneficiaries? And what does it mean for the whole sector? This is a really important topic. Mind you, I mean, of course, we still have to consider that at the very end of the day, you might have a supply chain idea to deliver. So in case everything else fails, and sometimes everything else does fail, you need to have the capacity and the logistics, knowledge and capacity to do so. So those are kind of important issues to come back to the basics every now and then to set up, keep what is it that we are here for and why are we delivering? And what shall we be doing in the first place?

DR: Well Nezih I know that you have several projects coming up, can you tell us about the special issues you have planned for the next year?

NA: We have three special issues that are cooking right now. And the earliest that we'll finish will be probably the first issue of 2023. And it's going to be on COVID-19 and its effects on humanitarian supply chains. Then we have another special issue that is almost being finalized on vaccine supply chains. And lastly, hopefully in 2023, if not in 2024, we will have a special issue on looking at logistics operations in complex emergencies. The thought behind that special issue was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how armed conflicts and other complexities change or challenge humanitarian logistics operations. So look out for those specialists.

DR: All of us will be open access, which is fantastic, because it'll be free to a worldwide readership. So, thank you for working on that, Sean, bringing that together for us.

SR: It's a pleasure. I'm honestly really excited about getting the journal out there and getting the response from people who will have access to it now.

DR: Wow, that's all really interesting. It's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you all three for joining me today.

NA: Thank you for inviting us.

SR: Thank you very much.

GK: Thank you.

DR: Thank you for listening to today's episode. You can find more information about our guests on our website where you will also find a link to the freely available 10 year anniversary issue. I'd like to thank our guests for joining me today. And also Alex Jungius of This is Distorted