Abstract
Humanitarian needs are intensifying globally while armed conflicts escalate and food insecurity reaches unprecedented levels (ALNAP, 2025). Simultaneously, humanitarian funding is declining, with European Union institutions projected to remain the only relatively stable donor. These dynamics render humanitarian organizing a critical empirical site for Business and Management and Organization Studies (BMOS). Yet, BMOS scholarship on humanitarian organizations (HOs) remains limited and largely dominated by functionalist, efficiency-driven approaches. Crisis is frequently conceptualized as an episodic disruption requiring coordination and optimization, rather than as a structural and historically constituted condition embedded in colonial and postcolonial relations. This study challenges neocolonial assumptions underpinning management theory by examining humanitarian organizing in Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, an ultraperipheral territory of the European Union and a contemporary Spanish settler colony off the West African coast. By recentring an ultraperipheral territory as a site of theory development rather than mere intervention, the research foregrounds the periphery as analytically central to BMOS debates on crisis and organization. The Canary Islands constitute a humanitarian containment zone shaped by racialized migration regimes, EU border governance, and enduring colonial legacies.
The study investigates two questions: What does humanitarian organizing in an ultraperipheral territory reveal about crisis as an ongoing structural condition rather than an episodic disruption? And how are humanitarian organizations across different scales navigating current challenges, and what (im)possibilities emerge for innovation?
Adopting a critical constructivist epistemology, the research employs a short-term longitudinal qualitative design. Data is gathered through two temporally spaced rounds of semi-structured interviews (n=40) across 13 humanitarian organizations, complemented by focused ethnographic observations and documentary analysis. Constructivist grounded theory guided iterative coding, informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on power and coloniality. Findings demonstrate that organizational scale operates as a power relation shaping access to funding, epistemic authority, and human rights outcomes. Grassroots and migrant-led organizations perform much frontline work yet remain structurally underfunded and epistemically marginalized, while larger international actors retain strategic and financial control. Crisis emerges not as exception but as continuity: spatially, temporally, and institutionally reproduced through humanitarian containment. The study contributes by reframing crisis as structurally constituted, reconceptualizing scale as relational and political, and empirically reintroducing the Canary Islands into colonial and management debates. Politically, it informs EU funding and governance mechanisms, demonstrating how organizational design and resource allocation shape possibilities for innovation in humanitarian contexts.