The painful truth is that the present is a relatively comfortable place for those who have reached positions of mainstream political or business leadership…many of those with the power to effect the necessary changes have the least motivation to alter the status quo that gave them the power.
This quote from Schmidheiny (1992) in the introduction to Bernard Amadei’s Engineering for sustainable human development (p. 3) summarises the underlying problem that the methodologies outlined in the book attempt to redress. Amadei then proceeds to conclude that “The same could be said of sustainable development and human development today…. Such logic [the idea of “empowering the poor”] is based on a combination of vested economic and political interests [and] complacency, … there is indeed a need for a new mindset for the way humanity is operating on the planet.” (Amadei, pg. 3). It is such a new mindset that the book attempts to motivate readers to consider.
For a book directed towards engineers, Engineering for sustainable human development is very interesting in its international development approach to engineering, an approach which, if adopted on a wider scale, would very likely lead to more successful and useful engineering projects worldwide. The book consists of a rapid but very broad overview of a variety of concepts and tools available for implementing engineering projects from a development standpoint and is intended as a “guide for engineers involved in small-scale development projects in communities described as being of high-medium risk and low capacity” (pp. 16–17). In these situations, Amadei explains, a project will only be successful if, in addition to being done correctly from a technical point of view, it is also the right project for the human situation in the region. In this context, the “human” in the title of the book must be taken in the developmental sense, not in the sense that the environment is unimportant (though it is not the major focus of the book itself), but rather in the sense that the “human factor” is a compulsory aspect of any successful engineering development project in historically and currently marginalised regions.
The book, though solely divided into chapters, could be considered to consist of three main sections. In the first three chapters, after providing a brief and rather critical introduction to the field of international development in general and an overview of the role of engineers in the development arena, Amadei describes several frameworks used for development project management. In the second set of chapters (4–12), the book reviews a sequence of methodologies for the successful implementation of engineering projects in developing region contexts. In order, the book offers a brief overview of community appraisal procedures, system dynamics modelling, project planning, capacity analysis and development, risk analysis, and community resilience analysis. While the level of detail possible for each of these methodologies would not suffice for the reader to be able to immediately apply any of these methods, it offers a solid enough introduction, along with references and real-world examples, to allow the reader to decide whether to pursue the topic further and continue their self-instruction from there. While necessarily very brief in its discussion of the tools it proposes, the book consistently offers elegantly simple examples (as tables and graphs) of each tool from real-world projects, allowing the reader to rapidly understand the purpose and use of each methodology. The chapter on system dynamics modelling, in particular, contains a very convincing introduction to the need for systems thinking in engineering. While humans tend to think in a linear fashion, the real world is anything but. For example, not only does climate change exacerbate poverty and poverty increase risk in engineering projects, but engineering also has the potential to affect both poverty and climate change – and that in either a positive or a negative manner, depending on the project in question. The book concludes with a third section that includes a few chapters on the use of engineering to deliver services (as opposed to technology), with particular emphasis on energy, water, and sanitation and hygiene.
Overall, the book is a very interesting introductory-level read on engineering for international development and is highly recommended for any member of an engineering team planning on carrying out a project in the context of a developing region. Readers will certainly need to further their self-instruction in the topics covered before arriving at the level of proficiency required to apply these methodologies and tools on their own. Reading this book will provide a very instructive and mind-opening introduction to the intersection between the fields of international development and engineering. It will provide persons trained as engineering professionals in industrialised contexts with the knowledge they need to understand the very different dynamics of project implementation in more marginalised regions.
Department of Bioresource Engineering, McGill University
[email protected]
© 2016 Canadian Water Resources Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07011784.2016.1183521
Reference
- Schmidheiny, S. 1992. Changing course: A global business perspective on development and the environment Boston: MIT Press.