Engineering for Development as Borderland Activity

ABSTRACT

The paper aims to build understanding of the recent growth of interest in engineering for international development as an emerging focus of new knowledge, practice, and community development. In the paper, we create a borderlands approach to studying the activities referred to as engineering for development and development engineering. These activities take place in ‘borderland’ spaces where new approaches are being tried out through creative engagement of networks and communities willing to integrate social as well as technical knowledge and practice. We analyze four cases, selected as exemplars of engineering for development, from a large data set of case studies to demonstrate the socio-economic impact of research. We found evidence of important and original engineering, which showed paradigmatic shifts in engineering knowledge and practice. There was ambivalence inside the engineering community about engineering quality, mixing pride in the building of new paradigms with modesty about whether new knowledge and practices were ‘real’ engineering. These findings provide evidence that engineering aimed at global development offers an exciting new ‘borderlands’ approach to engineering that warrants further study.

KEYWORDS:

• Engineering and development
• borderlands
• engineering knowledge
• practices
• communities

Acknowledgements

To the Open University for fieldwork funding. To Drs Sam Kayaga, Kevin Sansom, Sen Gupta, Alan Short and Martin Sweeting and their colleagues, for sharing their engineering for development knowledge and their case studies. To Paul Nugent, Cyrus Mody, Dean Nieusma, Jim Eitel and anonymous referees for their incisive and useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

David Wield http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3838-3724

Notes

1 Nieusma and Riley, “Designs on Development.”

2 Robbins et al., “Development Engineering Meets.”

3 Nugent, Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa, iii.

4 Brunet-Jailly, “Special Section: Borderlands,” 1.

5 Donnan and Wilson, “Borderlands,” 4.

6 Donnan and Wilson, “Borderlands,” 3.

7 See, for example, a burgeoning historical literature: Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America; Weber and Rausch, Where Cultures Meet; Hämäläinen and Truett, “On Borderlands”; Nugent, Boundaries.

8 Aldrich and Herker, “Boundary Spanning Roles”; Williams, Collaboration in Public Policy.

9 Jones, “Borderlands,” 22.

10 Hendricks, The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport.

11 See Manzana and Benito, Cities, Borders and Spaces, for more explanation.

12 Boundary work is well analyzed by Gieryn, “Boundary Work,” and Cultural Boundaries.

13 Boundary organizations are analyzed by Guston, Between Politics and Science.

14 Trevelyan, “Reconstructing Engineering from Practice.”

15 Trevelyan, “Reconstructing,” 1.

16 Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It, 3–4.

17 Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It, 7, referring to Constant, The Origin of the Turbojet Revolution.

18 Nieusma and Riley, “Designs.”

19 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

20 Robbins et al., “Development Engineering.”

21 Funtowicz and Ravetz, “Science for the Post-Normal Age.”

22 Report by Verrax, “Engineering Ethics and Post-Normal Science,” 78, on a talk given by Diane Michelfelder at the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology in 2016.

23 Verrax, “Engineering Ethics.”

24 Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.

25 UKCDS, “The Global Impact of UK Research.”

26 Robbins et al., “Mapping Engineering.”

27 Robbins et al., “Mapping.”

28 Development engineer is a term used to describe those engineers who work on international development related activities.

29 See Argyris and Schon, Organizational Learning; Schon, Reflective Practitioner; Senge, The Fifth Discipline; Wenger, Communities of Practice.

30 Impact case studies are published as https://results.ref.ac.uk/2014, last accessed 15 February 2019.

31 Robbins et al., “Mapping.”

32 Spaargaren and Mol, “Sociology, Environment and Modernity”; Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse; Huber, New Technologies and Environmental Innovation.

33 Yin, Case Study Research.

34 26% of urban dwellers, and 3% of rural dwellers, Interagency and Expert Group on MDG Indicators, The Millenium Development Goals Report 2012.

35 Interview with Sam Kayaga, conducted by Gordon Wilson, July 25, 2016.

36 Kayaga, op cit.

37 Ibid.

38 Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 201.

39 Interview with Martin Sweeting, conducted by Gordon Wilson, July 20, 2016.

40 Sweeting interview.

41 Cambridge Arsenic Project, “Predicting the Global Distribution.”

42 Lourides, “Design as Bricolage.”

43 Interview with Alan Short, conducted by Gordon Wilson, June 16, 2016.

44 Short interview.

45 Ibid.

46 Trevelyan, “Reconstructing Engineering.”

47 Kayaga interview.

48 Wilson, “Beyond the Technocrat.”

49 Lourides, “Design as Bricolage.”

50 Robbins et al., “Mapping.”

51 The concept of north-south cooperation is presented in detail in Robinson et al., Managing Development.

52 See for example Abbott and Wilson, Lived Experience.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UK Open University.