Dean Nieusma

In the developing world, philanthropic engineers offer rescue by wizardry, their bag of marvels filled with technical tricks like off-the-grid electricity fueled by scrub brush and washing machines powered by bicycles. Technological quick-fixes are a powerful lure, but the results will not meet the promise until technology bows to the larger context, according to a recent study co-authored by Rensselaer professor Dean Nieusma.

“The challenge is to get away from the technology as the silver bullet,” said Nieusma, an assistant professor in the department of science and technology studies.

The current model of “engineering for development” — development with technology at the core — promotes engineers as unilateral leaders, concluded Nieusma and co-author Donna Riley of Smith College, in the most recent edition of Engineering Studies. A better model, they said, would embed engineers into a larger team focused on policy, local context, and education.

“We need to move away from the ‘development without borders’ model — based on medicine’s Doctors without Borders — where engineers swoop in, build a project, and leave,” Nieusma said. “It would be more successful to think about engineering based on a public health model, where — instead of final ‘solutions’ — each step works to makes people’s lives better.”

Their study followed two projects — one a university-led exchange in Nicaragua, the second a non-governmental organization (NGO)-funded rural electricity project in Sri Lanka — concluding that, under the current model, the enduring benefit of engineering for development projects is actually on the social side of the equation.

“The big outcome is that experiences like service learning exchanges are world changing for students. And that’s wonderful. But we need to make sure that community members benefit even if the technology fails,” Nieusma said.

Nieusma and Riley are themselves proponents of engineering for development, and are members of the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network.

“The dominant story we hear is the front end — students are going here to do this, a nonprofit is going to do that — and there’s little follow-up,” Nieusma said.  “Donna and I compared notes from two very different cases, and we left with very similar findings. We’d like to help people see the complexity of what’s going on in these projects and the problems of the model without being negative. We hope we can help.”

In both cases, the projects were built around the idea of “capacity building,” which seeks to improve a developing region’s ability to perform a task for itself, rather than relying on gifts from a wealthy donor nation. And yet, despite their intentions, the authors found that the projects fell short of their ideals.

“Our study shows that the social side of development projects — even projects with technology at the core — is what endures, but the technology takes center stage. That move is damning for the project,” Nieusma said.

In Nicaragua, Riley found that the pressure for a successful “product” overshadowed the “process” of a capacity-building collaboration between Smith College and Grand Valley State University in the United States, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua and Universidad Popular de Nicaragua in Nicaragua. 

The partners worked together to build capacity for the economy in the Nicaraguan region of Estelí by improving the product development education offered at the region’s university campus.

The collaboration centered on a two-week product development course in Estelí, with five students participating from each of the four schools. The course focused on product design for developing markets using locally available materials and skills. Students developed product ideas including a removable passenger seat for a bicycle, a pressurized water patio washer, a vegetable cutter, a bicycle-powered washing machine, and a non-electric mechanical fan.

“In both the U.S. and Nicaraguan contexts, there was a tendency to fall back on the product over the process,” Riley wrote. “This focus on a specific technology or product as a measure of project success obscures the larger goals related to capacity building, and to developing a more socially just framework for development-oriented exchange programs.”

Additional limitations were posed by participants who were not fully fluent in the native language, and the gulf of difference in the economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds of the Americans and Nicaraguans.

In Sri Lanka, Nieusma found similar setbacks foil even experienced non-governmental aid agencies, as he followed a project to build a wood-burning power plant in a village of 1,400 people in the southwestern district of Monaragala. 

The project was led by Energy Forum, a Sri Lankan NGO based in Colombo, the country’s largest city. Energy Forum tries to use appropriate renewable energy technology to bring electricity to the half of Sri Lanka that lives “off the grid.” Unlike the Nicaraguan project, the Energy Forum participants were fluent in the native Sinhalese language of the village, understood the broader importance of capacity building, and had extensive experience working in similar settings, Nieusma observed.

”Yet despite their attention to context and their local knowledge, despite the balance of expertise and integrated approach to development, technical functionality still ended up playing a defining role in the project planning,” Nieusma wrote.

Nieusma also discussed the limitations of local “ownership” of the project. As a prerequisite for success, Energy Forum controlled all aspects of the project — conceiving it, planning it, implementing it, and managing it — even as the NGO sought to involve the community, Nieusma said.

“The Energy Forum was not ‘for hire’ by the local community, and the community members were in no position to make informed decisions about the project before being introduced to it,” he wrote.

Nieusma and Riley propose a reconsideration of the central concept of engineering for development.

“While many of the organizations acknowledge the centrality of interdisciplinary collaboration in their work, their naming as Engineers without Borders, Engineers for a Sustainable World, and Engineering World Health reinforces a disciplinary separateness that contributed to a silo effect.”

Social justice is a powerful motivation for donors and volunteers who contribute to philanthropic engineering projects — engineers want to feel that they too are making a difference, Nieusma said. But to match reality with ideals, the difference they offer must be more than technical know-how.