Humanitarian procurement: goals, success factors and trade-offs

Procurement represents a major area in humanitarian operations, with a significant portion of funds being used to access supplies and services to reach beneficiaries. This research aims to identify the goals, analyse their trade-offs and link them to critical success factors (CSFs) of humanitarian procurement (HP). This research explores the goals and CSFs through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of 217 academic papers, published between 2004 and 2025, including extensive descriptive and thematic analyses of the reviewed papers. As a result, it identifies 12 goals for HP, driven by performance, demand, community, market impact and regulation, and nine CSFs, subdivided into 20 components. It explores dependencies and trade-offs among them, resulting in a conceptual framework that organisations can use to understand procurement as a whole and to examine how these constructs depend on each other and interact in reality. This paper positions procurement within humanitarian logistics by specifying what objectives HP should pursue, what factors affect success in achieving these objectives, and the interplay among them. With the framework proposed in this paper, practitioners can utilise the identified goals and CSFs for the design of HP and to support the decision-making processes involved in HP. The paper provides an extended understanding of key procurement considerations to guide HP practice and research through a systemic view of HP and converges the literature related to CSFs and multiple interdependent goals in the procurement domain.