Humanitarian Cluster Leads as Fourth-Party Logistics Providers

The concept of a fourth-party logistics provider is increasingly explored in the literature and has come to focus on firms that are able to organize and run significant parts of a supply chain. These firms are assigned increasing responsibility for design, recruitment of other firms and maintenance of supply chains due to very specific skills. Within the humanitarian sector there is considerable reorganization of the necessarily agile supply chains necessary to deliver relief during disasters. This reorganization has included the designation of clusters for different types of activity, and significantly leadership of the cluster to specific organizations. This article applies the concept of a fourth-party logistics provider on the cluster concept to help develop a concept for how the cluster leads themselves should operate.