“The Influence of Blockchain Technology on Humanitarian Supply Chain Resilience: The Mediating Role of Trust and Collaboration in Resource Constraint Settings”.

Abstract

This study explores how blockchain can help to make humanitarian supply chains more resilient through the creation of trust and collaboration, specifically in a resource limited setting. Continuous inefficiencies and absence of transparency in humanitarian operations are the inspirations behind the research, which aims to assess the direct role of blockchain in resilience and the possible mediating mechanisms. The research hypothesizes the conceptualization of blockchain as strategic capability that supports both relational and operational performance guided by the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Swift Trust Theory (STT). Two hundred and fifty respondents who were the representatives of 300 humanitarian organizations in Freetown, Sierra Leone, collected data and examined using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results show that blockchain has a considerable positive effect on trust, collaboration, and resilience in general, and collaboration partly mediates the association, whereas trust does not have a mediating role. The research suggests the incorporation of blockchain-based collaboration and trust systems into the humanitarian action. The findings are relevant to the digital-transformation theory and can provide practical advice to policy-makers and practitioners who want to create resilient and transparent humanitarian systems.