Ideal and broken humanitarian supply chains: exploring education network design and Syrian refugees’ experiences in Jordan

This thesis explores humanitarian supply chain networks for Syrian refugees living in urban Jordan, focusing on NGO, and government educational services, and refugee experiences of these services. The study addresses the gap between idealised networks for educational programs and services and the actual needs and lived realities of refugee families. Literature shows how ideal HSC networks, deployed in reports, plans, and professional discourse more broadly, contrast with broken HSC that exist around refugee families and their life experiences. The research critiques traditional SC models historically rooted in commercial logistics and more recent HSC models that assume and promise rational, linear, bureaucratic solutions to humanitarian problems. These models, though logical in theory, do not fully explain or respond to complex refugee contexts and experiences. The study adopts Activity Theory (AT) as an approach to support the analysis of complex social, and technical relations between stakeholder groups, and presents these relations using the AT Systems’ concepts, networks and contradictions. The methodology deployed is interpretative-qualitative, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and 28 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, including international NGOs, Jordanian ministries, and Syrian refugees. Findings reveal complex HSC networks with various stakeholders, experiences, breakdowns, tensions, plans, and a marginalisation of human experience, obscured behind more tangible SC products and objects. One key finding shows that refugees feel pressured to leave education pathways to work and secure money and food for families. Another finding illustrates how educational SC split to provide additional services, but inadvertently result in community segregation and educational failures, rather than quality education and community integration. The results suggest planned, ideal HSCs do not acknowledge actual, lived in, broken HSCs, and how the ‘human’ in ‘humanitarian’ becomes obscured. Such problematic results were not intended by stakeholders, but result from well-intentioned, yet broken SC configurations. All of this while the humanitarian supply chains witness a significant withdrawal from critical roles played by the international community and UN organisations in supporting educational initiatives in recent years, exacerbating the challenges faced by these supply chains and further marginalising the lived experiences of refugees. This study provides two key contributions: it contrasts idealized HSC models with broken, lived-in HSC through AT as a novel framework, offering theoretical and practical insights, and it bridges HSC theory with AT to explore breakdowns in human and social experiences, expanding AT's application to humanitarian contexts. The findings are particularly relevant to researchers and professionals in humanitarian and refugee-related fields.