Mission impossible: operations management in complex, extreme, and hostile environments

Abstract

The environments in which international humanitarian organisations (IHOs) operate are not just complex, they are knotty. There are multiple features of the humanitarian context that create insurmountable obstacles for IHOs as they try to deliver life-saving assistance to populations in distress. For instance, extremely disruptive events caused by natural and manmade disasters happen in this context. Moreover, IHOs often face hostility as conflicts have become more dangerous and widespread. The realisation that the humanitarian context has such unique features led to a dedicated research stream for humanitarian operations in Operations Management (OM) in the mid-2000s. Interestingly, crises in other contexts have been observed to share similar features. Consequently, researchers increasingly argue that much can also be learned about conducting operations under impossible conditions from this context. Most recently, researchers have highlighted some lessons to be learned from the humanitarian sector about dealing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented crisis of our time. Nevertheless, these features and their implications for operations management (OM) remain ill-understood. This PhD thesis attempts to address this shortcoming. Using the humanitarian context as a research setting, I set out to learn about operations management (OM) challenges and strategies for crisis management in general and humanitarian relief in particular.The thesis explores the implications of some of the defining features of the humanitarian context that render it knotty (complexity, extremity, and hostility) for key OM functions. Three prominent, yet under-researched, phenomena are used as the basis for unravelling those implications, i.e., complex emergencies, overlapping disasters (i.e., concurrent crises) and armed conflicts. ComplexityIn the first study (Chapter 2), the phenomenon of interest is complex emergencies which are defined by the World Health Organisation as situations in which there is a "breakdown of state structures, the disputed legitimacy of host authorities, the abuse viii of human rights and possibly armed conflict". Complex emergencies constitute the majority of humanitarian crises world-wide, are increasingly the backdrop against which major natural disasters occur, and tend to be protracted crises. The politically charged nature of complex emergencies implies that host governments tend to behave in ways that induce complexity in humanitarian operations.The first study sought to understand how and why host governments behave towards IHOs and the subsequent impact on humanitarian logistics. Three factors are found to influence host government behaviour, namely (i) the levels of tensions between their strategic interests and those of IHOs, (ii) their general level of dependency on IHO services and (iii) their regulatory and enforcement capabilities. The sources of tension between host government-IHO interests range from political reasons that, for example, lead to restricted IHO access to areas controlled by no...

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