Business in Acute Crisis: A Humanitarian Impact Value Chain for Assessing Cross-Sector Partnerships

Abstract

Abstract Business–humanitarian partnerships are increasingly mobilised to respond to acute crises, yet in these extreme contexts even well-intentioned collaborations can harm crisis-affected populations and distort humanitarian action. In such settings, generic, outcome-focussed notions of impact fall short as tools for assessing cross-sector collaboration. This conceptual paper develops a normative framework—the Humanitarian Impact Value Chain (HIVC)—to assess the moral permissibility of business—humanitarian partnerships in acute crises. Building on the Impact Value Chain, we embed the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence as explicit ethical constraints at each stage, from issue framing and mission design to inputs, throughputs, outputs, outcomes, and impact. The HIVC distinguishes principle-consistent positive impact paths from principle-violating negative impact paths and shows how specific partnership configurations generate predictable patterns of benefit, harm, and institutional effects for crisis-affected populations and humanitarian actors. The paper contributes to business ethics by developing a role-based account of corporate responsibility in humanitarian CSPs. It contributes to CSP scholarship by recasting recurrent implementation failures as patterned value-chain configurations, and introduces institutional harm to humanitarian space as a morally significant consequence of principle-violating partnerships.