This book investigates the digital transformation of aid as a form of humanitarian extractivism. It focuses on how practices of data extraction shift power towards states, the private sector and humanitarians. Digital initiatives aimed towards ‘fixing’ the humanitarian system, making it better and more secure, also create risk and harm for vulnerable individuals and communities. Central to the digital transformation of aid is the digital body – with digital identities becoming a prerequisite for receiving aid and protection – and the centralisation of vulnerability arising from enormous databases holding ever more humanitarian data. Cyber-attacks, human error and technological problems generate risks for humanitarians, but also mean that humanitarians themselves can put populations in need at risk. The book explores new humanitarian spaces and practices such as the humanitarian drone airspace, wearable innovation challenges and ethics in global disaster innovation labs.

The world is hyperlinked, globalized, commercial, and innovative, yet it has never reached the pinnacle of progress and interconnection that mankind is capable of. The role of an efficient logistics system in realizing goals of sustainable development has never been more vital. Streamlined logistics can reduce carbon emissions, optimize resource use, and ensure that goods and services are delivered in a manner that supports both economic growth and environmental preservation. By enhancing supply chain efficiency and integrating green technologies, we can achieve a more sustainable and interconnected future, where progress does not come at the expense of the planet. Effective Logistics for Sustainable Development Goals educates, empowers, and inspires stakeholders to leverage effective logistics practices in pursuit of sustainable development goals (SDGs). By providing comprehensive insights, practical guidance, and showcasing success stories, this book illuminates the intricate relationship between logistics and economic advances and social and environmental sustainability. Through promoting an integrated approach to logistics management and fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders, the book serves as a catalyst for positive change, equipping readers with the knowledge and tools necessary to drive meaningful progress towards a more equitable, resilient, and prosperous future for all. Covering topics such as supply chain management, responsible consumption and production, and electronic logistics, this book is a valuable resource for supply chain professionals, business leaders and entrepreneurs, government officials and policy makers, academicians and researchers, and more.

Faced with the scale of global challenges such as poverty and inequality, one question is where to start. Humanitarian efforts can only ever have limited reach. Among all of human suffering, whom should we support? And what shapes our choices? Such questions are at the core of this book. Through an ethnographic account of moralities, it traces how everyday humanitarian practitioners challenge entrenched values of what matters, upending the notion that the large-scale is inherently important, and even questioning what ‘large’ means in the first place. Instead, these practitioners typically aim to create a difference in the life of a particular person, situating their limited actions within pervasive poverty.

Is it ever possible to separate humanitarian action from politics? Drawing on the experience of both practitioners and researchers, this book is an essential guide to the thorny interplay between what are too often considered as separate worlds. The humanitarian sector aims to separate its work from politics, arguing that independence and neutrality are essential in order to gain entry into disaster and conflict settings. Yet, humanitarian claims of non-involvement in politics have also been dismissed as misleading, naive, or counter-productive. In practice, humanitarians find themselves working within political settings on a daily basis. This book investigates the theory behind depoliticisation, the political background and context behind humanitarian action, and the daily dilemmas faced by practitioners walking that fine line between principles and pragmatism. Finally, this book considers the importance of decolonising mainstream understandings of humanitarianism and politics, and of placing understandings from the Global South at the heart of the discussion. Balancing theoretical insights with empirical grounding, field examples, and recommendations for policy and practice, this book is perfect for researchers and students in humanitarian studies, political science, international relations, human rights, development studies, disaster studies, and peace and conflict studies, as well as humanitarian practitioners and policy makers.

This book investigates how extractive capitalism has developed over the past three decades, what dynamics of resistance have been deployed to combat it, and whether extractivism can ever be transformed into being a part of a progressive development path. It was not until the 20th century that the extraction of natural resources and raw materials took on a decidedly capitalist form, with the global north extracting primary commodities from the global south as a means of capital accumulation. This book investigates whether extractivism, despite its well-documented negative and destructive socioenvironmental impacts and the powerful forces of resistance that it has generated, could ever be transformed into a sustainable post-development strategy. Drawing on diverse sectoral forms of extractivism (mining, fossil fuels, agriculture), this book analyses the dynamics of both the forces of resistance generated by the advance of extractive capital and alternate scenarios for a more sustainable and liveable future. The book draws particularly on the Latin American experience, where both the propensity of capitalism towards crisis and the development of resistance dynamics to ‘extractive’ capital have had their greatest impact in the neoliberal era. This book will be of interest to researchers and students across development studies, economics, political economy, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, and Latin American affairs.