EURO HOpe mini-conferences on Humanitarian Operations

March 2016 – June 2017
Prof. Dr. Maria Besiou (Kühne Logistics University - KLU)

Funded by German Research Foundation (DFG)

Brief description

The EURO HOpe mini-conferences aims to further exchange among researchers within the field of humanitarian operations. The project is financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and takes place in Hamburg (2016) and Vienna (2017). Several future goals for the conference working group have been defined: improving coordination within the research area, creating a shared database to benchmark the work, achieving higher practical relevance and direct cooperation with practitioners to get to the most pressing problems and generate interesting research in theory and practice, build trust and long-term relationships with humanitarian organizations, more collaboration within the group to generate big research projects, achieve more interdisciplinary work, and create a special issue to publish the specific papers on Humanitarian Operations.

Project purpose

The aim of the conferences is foremost to present an overview of the research and expertise within the conference working group, to facilitate cooperation and future personal points of contact. Secondly, the mini-conferences focus on discussions to facilitate the exchange of information among researchers in this area, and stimulated the work on new and important research topics. To achieve these aims, the mini-conferences are structured in six sessions addressing different topics within the area of Humanitarian Operations: Session 1 focus on the current state and the future of humanitarian operations research, Session 2 focus on Disaster preparedness and pre-positioning in Humanitarian Operations, Session 3 focus on Positioning and managing shelter sites, Session 4 focus on Post-disaster needs assessment and relief distribution, Session 5 focus on Resilience in disaster relief and development supply chains and Session 6 focus on Linking donations with operations.