Shared Value in Crisis: The Role of <scp>SMEs</scp> in Humanitarian Action

ABSTRACT Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are often marginalized in humanitarian research and policy, yet they play a vital role in sustaining livelihoods and services in crisis‐affected contexts. This article examines how SMEs co‐create humanitarian value through embedded, adaptive, and ethically situated practices. Drawing on a comparative case study of the Philippines and Yemen—two crises with contrasting institutional conditions—it develops a conceptual framework that integrates shared value, practical reason, and commons governance. The Philippines represents a disaster‐prone but institutionally scaffolded environment where SMEs engage through formal resilience clusters and business continuity frameworks. Yemen, by contrast, exemplifies institutional collapse, where SMEs sustain essential services through survival‐driven improvisation, informal governance, and moral obligations to communities. Empirical material was mainly derived from triangulated secondary sources, analyzed through deductive thematic coding and cross‐case pattern matching. Findings reveal two distinct pathways of SME engagement: resilience‐driven shared value under enabling conditions and survival‐driven shared value in fragile economies. While limited by the absence of direct SME voices, the study highlights the importance of recognizing SMEs as embedded humanitarian actors and calls for more inclusive frameworks that integrate local enterprise agency into crisis governance.