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The purpose of the study was to determine the major criteria for a credible integrated development planning (IDP) process in Mbombela municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.

The study utilizes a combination of sequential exploratory and explanatory mixed methods. About 120 key informants participated in the structured questionnaire, and a further seven interviews were conducted as elite interviews. Four multistakeholder workshop sessions with up to sixty-six participants each were conducted.

To strengthen the integrated planning in local government, the study recommended “stakeholder participation and ownership,” “leadership and accountability,” “impact and outcome-based focus,” “a compact value chain” and “monitoring and evaluation.”

The IDP process is a tactical planning gadget designed to achieve transformation and introduce new systems of governance. IDPs currently tend to lack standard criteria to measure their performance in promoting public leadership and responding to community needs, which is a major challenge in many municipalities across South Africa. Since its introduction in 2000 to fast-track service delivery, concerns have been raised about why there are still constant protests alleged to be caused by poor service delivery.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate humanitarian supply chains in the context of the Ukrainian crisis as example of complex emergency. The paper focuses on a selection of support modes: in-kind donations, cash-based assistance and local procurement.

This paper adopts a case-study approach and interpretive paradigm. Findings are based on the analysis of primary sources including interviews with three Polish humanitarian organizations, internal documents, and secondary sources such as published reports.

Findings indicate that in a middle-income urbanized country such as Ukraine non-standard modes such as cash transfer programs and local procurement can be employed, since the necessary infrastructure and market are operational. However, each mode has limitations, so they should match the local context and the needs of diverse social groups.

The findings and recommendations are specific to the case analyzed, Ukraine, and its socio-economic context. The research contributes to discussions about mode selection, stressing the links between mode, stage of the disaster response and local context.

Applying cash transfers and local procurement can reduce supply chain costs, such as transport and warehousing. Shortened supply chains enable faster responses and increased agility.

Cash transfers and procurement involve the local community and beneficiaries, and can better fulfill needs maintaining people’s dignity. However, for vulnerable groups and those in conflict zones, in-kind goods are a better option.

The author argues that the much-discussed dichotomy of cash or goods does not reflect reality; local and regional procurement should be added as important support modes in middle-income countries in crisis.

This “thought paper” is written by the special issue editors as a part of the five papers accepted and published in response to the special issue call for papers on logistics and SCM in the context of relief for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue on “refugee logistics” and analyse the nature and challenges of displacement from a displaced person’s perspective. The paper also argues for a more critical appreciation of the role and value that research in logistics, operations and supply chain management (LOSCM) can play in the delivery of services and care for refugees and IDPs from the perspective of preparedness and logistics planning of humanitarian organisations. The paper further outlines basic challenges to undertaking innovative, boundary pushing valuable and impactful research on “refugee logistics” given the difficult ideological, political and policy context in which “refugee logistics research” will be undertaken. The paper also advocates for more critical research in humanitarian logistics (HL), that explicitly acknowledges its ontological, epistemological and methodological limitations even when ethically sound. The paper concludes by suggesting a future research agenda for this new sub-field of humanitarian logistics research.

Conceptual paper utilising viewpoints, literature reviews as well as original ideas and thoughts of the authors.

The new field of “refugee logistics research” is important. It has been neglected in humanitarian logistics research for too long. Hence, there needs to be more research in this sub-field of humanitarian logistics.

This is a “thought paper”. It is the basic conceptual ideas of the authors. While it is not based on empirical work or data collection, it is based on a comprehensive literature research and analysis.

This paper advocates for the universal human rights of IDPs and refugees and their dignity, and how LOSCM can contribute to upholding such dignity.

It contributes indirectly to logistics policy and refugee policy as well as logistics service quality and advocacy for human rights and human dignity.

This study aims to examine Musina municipality’s tourism development status and plans with existing documents and respondents’ responses on their envisaged implications on tourism development and sustainability initiatives in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa.

Surveys, interviews and focus group discussions, supplemented by field observation and document reviews, gray literature alongside published literature, were applied. Subsequently, Microsoft Excel and cross-tabulation analysis orchestrated the analysis of the data.

The policy and strategy aspects contributing to the previous and actual tourism statuses in Musina municipality are defined. The study concludes that Musina Municipality has rich tourism possibilities but lacks a better tourism strategy to empower local communities. Nonetheless, it dwells in the most tourism-based landscape within the Vhembe District of Limpopo.

Musina Municipality is one of the driest areas in the north of Limpopo Province in South Africa. It is also marked by impoverished rural communities. Studies on sustainable tourism and development have increased in recent years. However, rare studies specialize in synergies within various forms of tourism. Also, significant resources to advance local communities in rural areas are not sufficiently appreciated.

When a major landslide and floods devastated Freetown, Sierra Leone had just overcome the Ebola crisis, which had left its mark on socio-political relations between different disaster response actors. With international disaster response frameworks increasingly shifting to local ownership, the national government was expected to assume a coordinating role. However, in “post-conflict” settings such as Sierra Leone, intra-state and state–society relations are continuously being renegotiated. This study aimed to uncover the complexities of state-led disaster response in hybrid governance setting at national and community levels in the response to the 2017 landslide and floods.

During the four months of fieldwork in Freetown in 2017, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with various state, aid and societal actors were conducted.

The findings show that a response to policy building on the idea of a uniform state response did not take into account intra-state power politics or the complexity of Sierra Leone's hybrid governance.

This paper argues for a more nuanced debate in humanitarian governance and practice on the localisation of aid in post-conflict and fragile settings.

The study's findings contribute to the literature on the disaster–conflict nexus, identifying paradoxes of localised disaster response in an environment with strong national–local tensions. The study highlights intra-local state dynamics that are usually overlooked but have a great impact on the legitimacy of different state authorities in disaster response.

This chapter presents research and analysis on the Institute for Economics and Peace’s (IEP’s) index in the Ecological Threat Report (ETR). In the analysis, 178 countries are examined at the sub-national level, accounting for 99.9% of the global population. The estimate consists of five indicators that aggregate to yield an index of ecological threats. These five indicators are water risk, the prevalence of stunting, the impact of natural disasters, projected population growth and projected temperature rise. The ETR is a tool that can be used to identify the countries that are at the highest risk of ecological threats. The index identifies that 30 countries facing the highest level of ecological threats as well as low levels of resilience are home to 1.26 billion people. At the end of 2020, in these 30 countries, 68% of the total people were forcibly displaced beyond their borders. As these 30 countries suffer collectively from the highest ecological threats and without the reversal of ecological degradation, displacement is very likely to continue. Without urgent development, ecological threats will continue to create humanitarian emergencies and will likely increase without a sustained effort to reverse the current trend.

This inquiry examines Musina Municipality's tourism development states and strategies with “a study of existing documents and respondents' acknowledgments on their conceived engagements on tourism administrations in Vhembe District, Limpopo Province, South Africa.” Imports of sustainable tourism and community subsistence have developed in modern years. Yet, not numerous such investigations centered on synergies inside the assorted characters of tourism and their businesses. Besides, meaningful aid to promote local settlements and sustainability in provincial districts is not modestly perceived. Hence the foremost aim is to appraise a strategy for consolidating tourism as an instrument for sustainable local community development (SLMD). The examination reasons that Musina Municipality has abundant tourism feasibilities and natural resources but requires a more diverse dependable tourism plan around the ecotourism market to permit the local inhabitants while promoting environmental sustainability.

To grasp the dynamics of tourism actualities and their management around the communities in the Municipality, Focus group discussion (FGDs), surveys, interviews and existing document inspections, supplemented by field observations, were appropriated. Consequently, Microsoft Excel, Cross-tabulation and manual sorting of data interpretation systematized the exploration of the data. The features supplementing the antecedent and modern tourism states toward sustainable-eco-tourism enterprises and assorted welfare in Musina Municipality got explained.

This study exposes an inoperative unity between sustainable tourism initiatives and ecotourism imperatives. The aforesaid could work enthusiastically on multiple forms of rural tourism in the adjoining local populations and the uprightness of urban tourism in Musina town. So, it has deliberated a basis for a conventional, sustainable, and ecotourism-bound market-orientated tourism approach to allow the local neighborhoods in Musina Municipality and its foundation toward the intact Province.

Musina Municipality is among the renowned desiccate precincts in the North of Limpopo Province in South Africa. It got designated by the poverty-stricken rural populations. A predicament is kindred to various agricultural societies elsewhere in the world. The Municipality nevertheless grounds itself in a diverse tourism-based exhibition within the Limpopo province, the Vhembe region. Such particularized wealth manifest through ecotourism-based realities akin to the Nwanedi Provincial Park (NPP), Tshipise Forever Resort (TFF), Nwanedi Resort (NN) and many others.