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Aligning industrial operations with sustainable development has become a pressing need for organizations, as they recognize the mounting environmental challenges, social inequalities and resources scarcity. The transformations brought by the industry 4.0 have revolutionized supply chain operations to achieve sustainability and circularity. The aim of this chapter is to explore and map the supply chain 4.0 opportunities for sustainability. An extensive literature review of theoretical and empirical studies linking the supply chain 4.0 technologies and sustainability is conducted. Descriptive and content analysis are employed to scrutinize and categorize the knowledge extracted from the literature. Then, a conceptual framework is developed to highlight the role that each technology plays in promoting sustainability and circularity in the context of supply chain. This study provides new perspectives for theoretical researches and guide decision-makers to implement sustainability-based technologies in the supply chain 4.0. Future research can investigate the opportunities of supply chain 5.0 for social sustainability and circular business model.

Sudan’s challenges are deeply rooted in a complex web of societal, political, and health-related issues. The nation is currently experiencing a challenging period that is impacting various aspects of human life, including the healthcare system for the youth, who are significantly impacted by this crisis that has persisted for a decade. Sudan, located in northeastern Africa, is an Arab nation and a member of the Greater Horn of Africa, along with Ethiopia and South Sudan. Despite its strategic location near the Nile River – a hub for global oil trade and other merchandise – it does not possess any military equipment. Its history, unfortunately, is marked by prolonged social conflicts. These conflicts have significantly affected essential infrastructures, social services, and the overall well-being of the population. We examine the conflict through humanitarian and socio-economic factors affecting Sudan and its people. This chapter explores the role of global economic forces and international relations in Sudan’s ability to address these challenges. Secondly, we explore the social structures, power dynamics, and interdependencies, examining how institutions and societal functions hinder comprehensive issue resolution through structural functionalism. Lastly, we will analyze the legal recognition and protection as foundational elements for human rights and assess the acknowledgment of rights, its absence influences the endurance of multifaceted challenges like health care and educational system by the Right to have Rights.

In this article, I answer the call to normalize and discuss how ethnographers navigate failure in the field by sharing my own experiences from long-term fieldwork in Malawi. I highlight, particularly, my own struggles with feelings of failure and the role of my interlocutors in helping me navigate and understand these situations.

My argument is based on more than 18 months of ongoing in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Malawi, where I study the everyday practices of civil servants active in disaster governance, focusing on those working for the Malawi Government Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA).

I use ethnographic vignettes to show how my interlocutors tried to teach me what being a Malawian civil servant is all about, which often came most forcefully to the fore in moments where either I or they deemed that I had failed to behave like one.

This adds new empirical data to the discussions on the various manifestations and roles of failure in ethnographic research, underlining how frictions and feelings of failure are a difficult yet productive and central part of fieldwork and ethnographic data creation.

This paper examines to what extent blockchain creates legitimacy and trust in different modes of public governance. It posits that while blockchain aims for political legitimacy through decentralising, immutable and consensus-based mechanisms, the execution of these mechanisms is limited in legitimating governance, which has knock-on effects on trust. It provides an original contribution by recontextualising and reframing blockchain as a governance mechanism that should, and must, perform a legitimating function in order to engender trust.

The research adopts a comprehensive framework for understanding the legitimacy of blockchain governance, positioning it in terms of co-governance, self-governance and hierarchical governance modes. It systematically analyses blockchain whitepapers, legislation, government documents and other sources in three paradigmatic case studies where blockchain governance failed. These cases are then used to assess blockchain according to three key characteristics of decentralisation, immutability and consensus.

The research finds that blockchain’s use in governance settings still relies on legitimacy conferred from other sources – namely state – in order to generate trust. Significant limitations in its de facto political decentralisation, immutability and consensus protocols can create failures in co-governance, self-governance and hierarchical-governance applications, thus limiting the legitimation function of blockchain in facilitating political trust.

These findings are significant in highlighting blockchain’s limitations as a decentralised, immutable and consensus-driven legitimating tool, which has knock-on effects on trust in technology and governance more broadly. It also has broader implications in more clearly highlighting the interconnectedness of political trust and legitimacy in governance processes.