Problem: Disasters cause massive destruction and their occurrence (even though declining since the last years) is still a topic of high actuality. To mitigate their negative impacts, in particular humanitarian organizations put a lot of effort into helping nations and people to recover from disasters by providing relief commodities. Responding adequately to a disaster is difficult due to its highly complex and uncertain nature. Flexible but efficient supply chains are needed, which makes high demands on procurement operations. Within disaster relief logistics, procurement accounts for 65 % of total expenditures. Despite its significance, literature does not specifically focus on problems related to disaster relief procurement, which creates the need to examine this topic further, from theory as well as from practice. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze sourcing policies, currently applied by the largest humanitarian organizations in the field of disaster relief. Method: This thesis conducted a descriptive and exploratory study of the literature in order to create a framework for a content analysis. During the content analysis, 108 officially published reports of the 14 biggest humanitarian organizations (concerning their annual budget) were investigated concerning their procurement policies in disaster response operations. Hence, this study uses a qualitative approach for a cross-sectional analysis of secondary data. Conclusions: The findings of this paper present an overview of currently applied procurement concepts in disaster response. The compilation of a comprehensive sourcing toolbox allows the classification of sourcing policies. The results show a tendency, that similar procurement policies are applied in the largest humanitarian organizations regarding the area of sourcing or the number of suppliers. A lack of awareness and/or transparency was discovered regarding environmentally friendly procurement policies. The application of ethical procurement (social factors) is however highly emphasized by the organizations. An unexpected discovery was the importance of long-term agreements and the frequent application of tendering processes for supplier selection. Further research opportunities lie in the field of demand tailored sourcing instead of pre-stocking to reduce inventory costs or in the comparison of sourcing practices applied in big and small organizations. To sum up, humanitarian organizations not only focus on quick deliveries, also quality and cost efficiency are increasingly paid attention in the field of disaster response procurement.

Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Doina Caragea / Huge amounts of data that are generated on social media during emergency situations are regarded as troves of critical information. The use of supervised machine learning techniques in the early stages of a disaster is challenged by the lack of labeled data for that particular disaster. Furthermore, supervised models trained on labeled data from a prior disaster may not produce accurate results. To address these challenges, domain adaptation approaches, which learn models for predicting the target, by using unlabeled data from the target disaster in addition to labeled data from prior source disasters, can be used. However, the resulting models can still be affected by the variance between the target domain and the source domain. In this context, we propose to use a hybrid feature-instance adaptation approach based on matrix factorization and the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, respectively. The proposed hybrid adaptation approach is used to select a subset of the source disaster data that is representative of the target disaster. The selected subset is subsequently used to learn accurate supervised or domain adaptation Naïve Bayes classifiers for the target disaster. In other words, this study focuses on transforming the existing source data to bring it closer to the target data, thus overcoming the domain variance which may prevent effective transfer of information from source to target. A combination of selective and transformative methods are used on instances and features, respectively. We show experimentally that the proposed approaches are effective in transferring information from source to target. Furthermore, we provide insights with respect to what types and combinations of selections/transformations result in more accurate models for the target.

abstract: ABSTRACT This dissertation examined how seven federal agencies utilized Twitter during a major natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy. Data collected included tweets between October 26-31, 2012 via TweetTracker, as well as federal social media policy doctrines and elite interviews, to discern patterns in the guidance provided to federal public information officers (PIOs). While scholarly research cites successful local and state government efforts utilizing social media to improve response efforts in a two-way communications interaction, no substantive research addresses social media’s role in crisis response capabilities at the federal level. This study contributes to the literature in three ways: it focuses solely on the use of social media by federal agencies in a crisis setting; it illuminates policy directives that often hamper federal crisis communication response efforts; and it suggests a proposed model that channels the flow of social media content for PIOs. This is especially important to the safety of the nation moving forward, since crises have increased. Additionally, Twitter was adopted only recently as an official communications tool in 2013. Prior to 2013, social media was applied informally and inconsistently. The findings of this study reveal a reliance upon a one-way, passive communication approach in social media federal policy directives, as well as vague guidelines in existing crisis communications models. Both dimensions are counter to risk management and crisis communication research, which embrace two-way interactivity with audiences and specific messaging that bolsters community engagement, which are vital to the role of the PIO. The resulting model enables the PIO to provide relevant information to key internal agencies and external audiences in response to a future crisis. / Dissertation/Thesis / Crisis Tweet Text and Data / Doctoral Dissertation Mass Communication 2017

Haiti experienced the greatest urban disaster of international history in 2010 when the county was hit by an earthquake which triggered one of the largest responses of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts ever identified. The Haitian population was harshly affected by the earthquake, killing approximately 200 000 people, injuring 300 000 and displacing over 2,3 million. Reports from the post-disaster period also revealed that gender inequalities were growing deeper and that cases of sexual based violence against women and girls increased massively. The history of Haiti shows similar patterns of discrimination and gender based violence against women and children. Research upon gender based violence in the aftermath of disaster presents that disastrous events such as an earthquake, often is followed by an increase in gender based – and sexual gender based violence. Disasters could also provide a window of opportunity for change of  traditional roles and social norms in societies where they are deeply rooted. In order to seize this opportunity disaster management needs to acknowledge and adapt to gendered needs and capacities in all stages of disaster relief efforts in order to provide these opportunities for the subordinated gender. This research is studying the responsive policies of the Haitian government in the aftermath of the earthquake 2010, presented in the Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti. The aim is to investigate if any exercises of power could be observed to have affected the increase of gender based violence and sexual gender based violence for women and children in the post-earthquake responsive period. The study will be carried out as a text-analysing, desk study and by applying the theoretical framework of Steven Lukes three-dimensional power approach and the theory of radical feminism abductively. The findings of this research presents that power exercises by the government can be observed to have affected the increase of gender based – as well as sexual gender based violence in the period of study.

The scholarly field of International Relations (IR) has been slow to appreciate the evolutions in forms of governance authority currently seen in the European political system. Michael Barnett has insisted that ‘IR scholars also have had to confront the possibility that territoriality, authority, and the state might be bundled in different ways in present-day Europe’ (2001, 52). This thesis outlines how modern governing authority is generated and maintained in a Europe that is strongly impacted by the many institutions, departments, and agencies of the European Union (EU). Using the specific cases of the EU’s disaster response organisation, the DG for Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid (ECHO), and the hub for EU internal security policy management, the DG for Home and Migration Affairs (HOME), this thesis understands the different policy areas under EU policymaker and bureaucrat jurisdictions as semi-autonomous fields of practice – fields that are largely confined to the groups of bureaucratic, diplomatic, corporate, NGO, contracted, and IO that exist in Brussels, decidedly removed from in-field or operational personnel. Transnational governance authority in Europe, at least in these two fields, is generated and maintained by actors recognised as highly expert in producing and using data to monitor for the risks of future disasters and entrenching that ability into central functional roles in their respective fields. Both ECHO and HOME actors came to be recognised as central authorities in their fields thanks to their ability to prepare for unknown future natural and manmade disasters by creating and collecting and managing data on them and then using this data to articulate possible future scenarios as risks. They use the resources at their disposal to generate and manage data about disaster and security monitoring and coordination, drawing on these resources to impress upon the other actors in their fields that cooperating with ECHO and HOME is the best way to minimise the risks posted by future disasters. In doing so, both sets of actors established the parameters by which other actors understood their own best practices: through the use of data to monitor for future scenarios and establish criteria upon which to justify policy decisions. The specific way ECHO and HOME actors were able to position themselves as primary or central figures, namely, by using centralised data management, demonstrates the role that risk practices play in generating and maintaining authority in complex institutional governance situations as currently seen in Europe.

Communication is often limited in a disaster area and other emergency situations where no infrastructure exists or existing infrastructure has been destroyed. This makes its difficult for relief workers in the field to communicate with one another and with their home head office. Ericsson Response has developed a Wireless LAN in Disaster and Emergency Response (WIDER) solution. WIDER is based on broadband Wireless LAN internetworking to satellite and GSMnetworks. The WIDER solution has identified ways for organizations to share their communication infrastructure, and information in a secure and cost effective manner during an emergency response operation. Data over WIDER needs to be secured to prevent from unauthorized access to sensitive information of relief organizations. VoIP calls should be protected against eavesdropping. The thesis investigated how to enhance security solution in WIDER and implement a secure VoIP client. Measurements of the performance of WIDER and the total delay of VoIP over satellite were used to estimate the capability of WIDER before deployment in the field. / Kommunikation är ofta begränsad i katastrofområden och andra nödsituationer där infrastruktur saknas eller har blivit förstörd. Det gör det svårt för fältarbetande personal att kommunicera, både med varandra och centraliserade kontor. Ericsson Response har utvecklat en lösning kallad "Wireless LAN in Disaster and Emergency Response" (WIDER). WIDER använder trådlöst LAN och är en bredbandsbaserad internetteknik mot satelit- och GSM-nätverk. WIDER har identifierat lösningar för organisationer att dela deras infrastruktur för kommunikation och information på ett säkert och kostnatseffektivt sätt vid nödsituationer. Informationen som skickas via WIDER behöver bli skyddad för att förhindra oaktorisierad tillgång till känslig information. VoIP förhindrar obehöriga att avlyssna trafiken. Examensarbetet har undersökt den utökade säkerhetslösningen för WIDER och har implementerat en säker VoIP-klient. Mätningar av prestanda hos WIDER och den fördröjning som sker med VoIP över satelitlänk användes för att estimera WIDERs kapacitet innan systemet används i fält.

The “WLAN in Disaster Emergency Response” (WIDER) project has developed and implemented an emergency communication system. It provides network and communication services to relief organizations. In order to guarantee the stable and efficient connectivity with a high quality of service (QoS) for the end user, and to make the WIDER system more adaptive to the disaster area, the IEEE 802.16 specification based broadband wireless access solution is adopted. This thesis work aims at evaluating and testing the WIDER system integrated with WiMAX. By learning and analyzing the technology, the benefits and perspective for WIDER using WiMAX are described. A WiMAX solution was configured and integrated into the WIDER system. A series of tests and measurements provide us the performance of the WiMAX solution in throughput, QoS, and reality. The tests helped us to learn and verify the improvements for WIDER due to WiMAX. / “WLAN in Disaster Emergency Response” (WIDER) projektet har utvecklat och implementerat ett kommunikationssystem för katastrof situationer. Systemet tillhandahåller nätverk- och kommunikationstjänster för hjälporganisationer. För att garantera en stabil och effektiv anslutning med hög Quality of Service för användarna samt göra WIDER systemet mer anpassbart för katastrofområden, kommer Broadband wireless access som är baserade på IEEE 802.16 specifikationen att användas. Det här examensarbetet har som målsättning att utvärdera och testa WIDER med WiMax tekniken, vi beskriver olika fördelar och synvinklar med att använda WiMax genom att lära oss och analysera tekniken. En WiMax lösning konfigurerades och integrerades i WIDER systemet. En rad tester och mätningar visar WiMax-lösningens prestanda i form av throughput, Quality of Service och realitet. Testerna lärde oss och hjälpte oss att verifiera förbättringarna i WIDER i och med användningen av WiMax.

This thesis examines how local knowledge is identified and implemented in disaster responseand recovery programmes conducted by international aid organizations. The case that isexamined in the analysis is the International Federation of Red Cross and Red CrescentSocieties response and recovery operations conducted in the aftermath of the Nepalearthquake 2015-2019. Using the method of content analysis, the final report of the Nepaloperation is analyzed using categorizations of local knowledge and informed by previousresearch on local knowledge in disaster operations, along with international aid organizations'engagement with local knowledge.The main findings of this study shows that the implementation of activities that utilize orseeks to identify local knowledge is heavily concentrated to the recovery phase of theoperation, with no activities informed by local knowledge found in the response phase. Allcategories of local knowledge are found throughout the operation, with socio-culturalknowledge being the most prominently utilized, whilst environmental knowledge andorganizational knowledge remains underrepresented. Activities that were not informed bylocal knowledge, or utilized local knowledge to some degree created unintendedconsequences, suggesting that for a productive utilization of local knowledge, it has to beconsidered in all steps of the operational planning.

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