Humanitarian-Commercial Supply Chain Interface: Collaboration Models, Tension Management, and Effectiveness in Protracted Crises in North East Nigeria

This dissertation develops an original theoretical and empirical analysis of the humanitarian-commercial supply chain interface in protracted crises, with comprehensive fieldwork conducted across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States in North East Nigeria. The protracted humanitarian crisis in North East Nigeria, now in its second decade, has created an evolving interface between humanitarian supply chains managed by UN agencies and international NGOs, and commercial supply chains serving residual economic activity in the same geographic spaces. This interface involves both productive collaboration, through commercial delivery agent contracting and local market procurement, and persistent tensions around price distortion, community dependency, and competitive displacement. Existing humanitarian logistics literature addresses operational efficiency within humanitarian systems but lacks theoretical frameworks for understanding the co-evolutionary dynamics of humanitarian-commercial supply chain interfaces in protracted crises. Drawing on network theory, hybrid organisation theory, and supply chain collaboration literature, the dissertation constructs an original Humanitarian-Commercial Interface Evolution Model proposing five interface stages from parallel operation through competition, selective collaboration, hybrid integration, and managed co-existence. Using a longitudinal multi-site design, the study combines three years of field data from 12 humanitarian organisations and 35 commercial firms operating in the crisis zone, 70 in-depth interviews, and 18 months of participant observation at four supply chain coordination platforms. Grounded theory methods and longitudinal case comparison are applied. Original contributions include the Humanitarian-Commercial Interface Evolution Model, the Interface Tension Typology, and empirical evidence on collaboration effectiveness conditions unique to protracted crisis supply chain systems. Keywords: humanitarian supply chain, commercial supply chain, collaboration, protracted crisis, North East Nigeria.