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Article
Publication date: 1 August 2016

Cécile L'Hermitte, Peter Tatham, Ben Brooks and Marcus Bowles

The purpose of this paper is to extend the concept of agility in humanitarian logistics beyond emergency operations. Since the humanitarian logistics literature focuses primarily…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to extend the concept of agility in humanitarian logistics beyond emergency operations. Since the humanitarian logistics literature focuses primarily on emergencies and sees longer term and regular operations as being conducted in relatively stable and predictable environments, agile practices are usually not associated with humanitarian protracted operations. Therefore, this paper explores the logistics and supply chain environment in such operations in order to identify their basic features and determine if agility is an important requirement.

Design/methodology/approach

Using a case study of the United Nations World Food Programme, the authors collected and analysed qualitative and quantitative data on the characteristics of protracted operations, the risks and uncertainties most frequently encountered, their impact, and the ways that field logisticians manage contingencies.

Findings

The research demonstrates that unpredictability and disruptions exist in protracted operations. Therefore, short-term operational adjustments and agile practices are needed in order to support the continuity of humanitarian deliveries.

Research limitations/implications

Future research should focus on a wider range of humanitarian organisations and move from a descriptive to a prescriptive approach in order to inform practice. Notwithstanding these limitations, the study highlights the need for academics to broaden the scope of their research beyond emergencies and to address the specific needs of humanitarian organisations involved in longer term operations.

Originality/value

This paper is the first empirical research focusing exclusively on the logistics features of humanitarian protracted operations. It provides a more concrete and complete understanding of these operations.

Details

Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management, vol. 6 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2042-6747

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 21 November 2023

Taro Komatsu, Kaoru Ghalawinji-Yamamoto, Yukari Iwama and Sayo Hattori

The purpose of this paper is to explore how vulnerable refugee children's education can be supported in the first asylum country during a long-term, complex crisis. More…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how vulnerable refugee children's education can be supported in the first asylum country during a long-term, complex crisis. More specifically, the authors examine the impact of a remedial education (RE) program on academically challenged Syrian refugees' sustained learning and well-being in Jordan during a protracted emergency.

Design/methodology/approach

Using the 2012 United Nations human security framework, the authors analyze the quantitative results of program evaluation, supplemented by qualitative surveys and stakeholder interviews that asked about the aspirations of refugee children and their guardians, their school experience and the refugee–host community relationship.

Findings

The authors' data suggest that the program enhanced targeted Syrians' protection and empowerment. Their increased sense of safety and improved academic performance and learning motivation were likely owing to child-friendly classroom management and pedagogies that facilitated interactive and differentiated learning. Their human security was further strengthened when they learned with Jordanian children who experienced similar academic challenges and with teachers sympathetic to their plight. Meanwhile, a human security framework calls for humanitarian agencies' strategic engagement with local partners to ensure refugees' learning continuity.

Originality/value

Refugee education studies in first asylum countries are rare. Even rarer are studies focusing on academically low-achieving refugees with full consideration of the protracted and complex nature of a crisis. This study suggests effective measures to increase their human security while calling for humanitarian aid organizations to use long-term thinking.

Details

International Journal of Comparative Education and Development, vol. 26 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2396-7404

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 6 March 2023

Venesser Fernandes, Winnie Wong and Michael Noonan

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early…

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Abstract

Purpose

During the COVID-19 crisis in Victoria, Australia the complexity of school leadership increased greatly for school principals. This study focused on the lived experiences of early career principals in the independent school sector from March to November 2020 in Victoria, Australia. It investigates transformative work that was undertaken by these leaders in leading their schools over a protracted crisis.

Design/methodology/approach

The study builds on constructs of crisis leadership, adaptive leadership, agile leadership and emotional intelligence, exploring the leadership approaches undertaken by twenty-two early career principals in Victoria, Australia. Using a narrative inquiry approach, across three temporal points in 2020, storied productions drawn from the findings present four emergent types of emotionally intelligent leadership approaches undertaken by these principals. These leadership approaches are presented as the commander-leader, the conductor-leader, the gardener-leader and the engineer-leader with each approach demonstrating both organisational leadership approaches as well as individual leadership styles used by these principals as they led their schools.

Findings

The findings have direct implications for professional development programs focusing on aspiring principals and early career principals with emphasis on the importance of developing emotionally intelligent skillsets in principals for use during periods of rapid change or high crisis in schools. The findings present insight into the support useful for early career principals in the first five years of principalship.

Originality/value

This study uses a unique emotional intelligence approach to understand school leadership during and after a crisis.

Details

International Journal of Educational Management, vol. 37 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-354X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 19 July 2022

Andrew Swindell, Kathlyn Elliott and Brian McCommons

Education in Emergencies (EiE) as a subfield of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has played a vital role in advocating for the world’s most vulnerable people with a

Abstract

Education in Emergencies (EiE) as a subfield of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has played a vital role in advocating for the world’s most vulnerable people with a focus on short-term responses to specific events like conflict and natural disasters that often occur in the Global South. However, recent events, like the protests exposing structural racial and gender inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and multiple global “slow” conflicts, have revealed a different nature of modern emergencies where issues, which are often considered important but not urgent, can quickly become emergencies under the right circumstances or have in fact always been so. Accordingly, in this chapter, we reimagine a broader framework for EiE which includes long-term, systemic, and universal challenges that affect both the Global North and South. The chapter includes a historical review of EiE as a subfield within CIE along with evidence of new forms of modern emergencies in the United States, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, and Syria that build toward a broader framework of EiE intended for both CIE scholars and practitioners.

Details

Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-618-9

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 8 November 2010

Alan Freeman

This chapter restores the concepts of freedom, consciousness, and choice to our understanding of “economic laws,” so we may discuss how to respond to economic crisis. These are…

Abstract

This chapter restores the concepts of freedom, consciousness, and choice to our understanding of “economic laws,” so we may discuss how to respond to economic crisis. These are absent from orthodox economics that presents “globalization” or “the markets” as the outcome of unstoppable forces outside human control.

They were integral to the emancipatory political economy of Karl Marx but have been lost to Marxism, which appears as the inspiration for mechanical, fatalistic determinism. This confusion arises from Marxism's absorption of the idea, originating in French positivism, that social laws are automatic and inevitable.

The chapter contests the organizing principle of this view: that economic laws are predictive, telling us what must happen. Marx's laws are relational, not predictive, laying bare the connection between two apparently distinct forms of appearance of the same thing, such as labor and price. Such laws open the door to democracy and choice, but do not unambiguously predict the future because what happens depends on our actions.

The commodity form conceals these laws, disguising the true social and class relations of society. Accumulation, however, undermines the circumstances that permit the commodity to play this role. The result is crisis, defined in this chapter as the point when the blind laws of the commodity form are suspended and open political forces come into play.

In past crises, capitalism has restored the rate of profit through such destructive interventions as imperialism, war, and fascism. Economic laws, properly defined, offer society the real choice of alternative outcomes from crisis.

Details

The National Question and the Question of Crisis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-493-2

Book part
Publication date: 23 October 2017

Joerg Bibow

This paper investigates the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policies. It identifies an anti-growth bias in the ECB’s monetary policy approach: the ECB is quick to hike, but…

Abstract

This paper investigates the European Central Bank’s (ECB) monetary policies. It identifies an anti-growth bias in the ECB’s monetary policy approach: the ECB is quick to hike, but slow to ease. Similarly, while other players and institutional deficiencies share responsibility for the euro’s failure, the bank has generally done “too little, too late” with regard to managing the euro crisis, preventing protracted stagnation, and containing deflation threats. The bank remains attached to the euro area’s official competitive wage repression strategy which is in conflict with the ECB’s price stability mandate and undermines the bank’s more recent unconventional monetary policy initiatives designed to restore price stability. The ECB needs a “Euro Treasury” partner to overcome the euro regime’s most serious flaw: the divorce between central bank and treasury institutions.

Details

Economic Imbalances and Institutional Changes to the Euro and the European Union
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-510-8

Keywords

Expert briefing
Publication date: 7 December 2017

Humanitarian financing reform in East Africa.

Details

DOI: 10.1108/OXAN-DB226323

ISSN: 2633-304X

Keywords

Geographic
Topical
Book part
Publication date: 29 May 2018

Milena Belloni

Purpose – Studies have described how migrants progressively transform extraneous spaces into familiar, meaningful environments, turning them into ‘homes’. However, in some…

Abstract

Purpose – Studies have described how migrants progressively transform extraneous spaces into familiar, meaningful environments, turning them into ‘homes’. However, in some contexts the opposite process occurs: what once felt like home becomes alien, unrecognizable and extraneous. Building on ethnographic vignettes on the everyday life of immobile young Eritreans, this chapter explores the paradox of ‘not feeling at home’ while being physically there.

Methodology – The chapter builds on three months’ ethnographic fieldwork in Eritrea and extended participant observation among Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, Sudan and Italy from 2012 to 2014.

Findings – I show how the youth, in a pervasive context of migration culture, articulate a sense of belonging towards what they imagine as the ‘outside world’, while being unable to make sense of their lives in their own homeland. Using the notions of ‘estrangement’ and home-unmaking, it is possible to account for the feelings of those living in conditions of protracted crisis and explore the subjective worlds of prospective refugees.

Originality/Value – The chapter’s originality lies in the uniqueness of the ethnographic material and in the innovative approach to the debate on home-making and refugee studies. Instead of considering refugees’ home-making processes in other countries, this chapter analyses the experience of losing home without moving. By using the concept of estrangement, it investigates the manifold meanings of immobility while adding to the theoretical discussion on home-making/unmaking processes. Moreover, it contributes to the empirical investigation of determinants of asylum flows by investigating the case of Eritrea, a major refugee-producing country.

Details

Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-206-2

Keywords

Expert briefing
Publication date: 23 December 2016

Since South Sudan’s conflict entered its most recent phase in July, humanitarian needs have risen. Donors and relief agencies will prepare for another year of a large-scale…

Article
Publication date: 14 February 2022

Mehwish Raza

This paper aims to report insights from the planning and execution phase of an interactive radio instruction (IRI) intervention envisioned as a medium-term response plan to…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to report insights from the planning and execution phase of an interactive radio instruction (IRI) intervention envisioned as a medium-term response plan to address school closures amidst the global Coronavirus pandemic. The project has been envisioned by a local development agency in the province of Balochistan for adolescent out-of-school (OOS) girls.

Design/methodology/approach

This study reports respondents’ academic achievement through the one-group pretest-posttest design method across numeracy, literacy, civic education and indigenous crafts. Participating adolescent girl respondents were randomly selected from six districts of Balochistan and the results assert a positive impact of IRI intervention. Thus, showcasing IRI as a promising approach to address protracted challenges of educational accessibility in remote areas of Pakistan.

Findings

The mean score comparison of pre-test–post-test across four curriculum subjects indicates the greatest gains in numeracy and civic education. Results also highlight the significance of the pedagogical capacity of IRI developers and the quality of supplementary educational kits paired with IRI during this intervention.

Research limitations/implications

The findings of this study focus on design and implementation phases eliminating the analysis of learners’ behaviour, environmental factors and family support. Further research is suggested to identify gaps in related dimensions for the success of IRI in Pakistan.

Originality/value

This study contributes data-driven findings from a pioneer on-going IRI project in Balochistan, a hard-to-reach province where the ratio of OOS adolescent girls exceeds 78%. This study also proposes vital steps for the longevity of IRI to solve protracted educational crises in Pakistan.

Details

Journal for Multicultural Education, vol. 16 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2053-535X

Keywords

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