The Palgrave Handbook of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Focusing on the specific challenges of research design and exploring the opportunities of conducting research in humanitarian logistics and supply chain management, this handbook is a significant contribution to future research. Chapters include extensive descriptions of methods used, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, and the challenges in scoping, sampling, collecting and analysing data, as well as ensuring the quality of studies. Covering a wide variety of topics including risk and resilience and the impact of humanitarian logistics on capacity building, sustainability and the local economy, it also explores the need for scalability and co-ordination in the humanitarian network. Contributors provide important insight on future directions and offer crucial guidance for researchers conducting projects within the field.  

Gyöngyi Kovács is the Erkko Professor in Humanitarian Logistics at Hanken School of Economics, Finland. She is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management (JHLSCM) and is on the editorial board of several others. She has published extensively in the area of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management and is currently supervising a number of doctoral dissertations in these fields. She led the Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research Institute (HUMLOG Institute), Hanken School of Economics since its establishment in 2008 until 2014.

Karen Spens is Professor of Supply Chain Management and Corporate Geography and the Rector (Dean) of the Hanken School of Economics. She is a founding Editor-in-Chief of  the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management (JHLSCM) and is on the editorial board of several others. She has published extensively in the areas of health care logistics, as well as humanitarian logistics and supply chain management.

Mohammad Moshtari is a postdoctoral research fellow at Hanken School of Economics. He completed his PhD programme at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Switzerland. His research area is in inter-organisational relationships within a humanitarian setting and he has published in several peer-reviewed international journals.