Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPMENTAll this means that more is needed from engineers as professionals.Some engineers, with the right skills and experience, arecertainly needed in disaster response to help save lives. But allengineers have an important role in reducing both the hazardspeople face and their vulnerability to those hazards; they canhelp with disaster preparedness. With a greater understandingof climatic changes, engineers can design more resilientsolutions or adapt existing infrastructure. With more inputinto the early stages of planning and political decision making,engineers can help ensure that their work is destined only tohelp people, and they can also help people understand thattechnological solutions might not exist and that other changesare needed. With a greater emphasis on professional standards,safety and good coordination across the design, build,operation and maintenance stages, engineers can reduce theharm of technological failures. With a professional and zerotolerancestance on corruption, particularly in construction,engineers can provide solutions that can be trusted to standfirm. Finally, as more than 95 per cent of personnel involvedin disaster relief organizations are local staff, engineers canimprove technical education and expertise in places where thehumanitarian need is greatest and thus help build long-termcapacity to cope.Humanitarianism and ProfessionalizationThere are strong parallels between the engineering andhumanitarian communities. Engineering is a profession, andmany engineers are professional in the true sense of the word;they are accountable to their peers and to the public for theiractions. The humanitarian sector is trying to professionalizeA guide about built environmental professionalsThe Royal Institution of CharteredSurveyors commissioneda report from the Max LockeCentre, published in 2009, tohelp non-technical decisionmakers in humanitarian emergenciesbetter understand theroles of different built environmentalprofessionals. CalledThe Built Environment Professions in Disaster Risk Reductionand Response – A guide for humanitarian agencies*,it sets out the roles of architects, surveyors, planners andengineers across seven phases of disaster management.The guide demonstrates the case for greater use of builtenvironment professionals in the humanitarian sector,and emphasizes their importance in achieving a sustainablelonger term recovery.* Available from http://www.rics.org/site/scripts/download_info.aspx?downloadID=829&fileID=991and is working to develop its own voluntary codes of conduct,codes of practice, field guides and manuals, training andprofessional development courses, methods of coordinationbetween actors and minimum operational standards. 120 Theseare facilities that have long been established in the engineeringprofession. However, the humanitarian community doesnot yet have a formal professional institution of its own tospearhead similar efforts as progress in this area often lies withvoluntary and poorly-funded groupings of aid agencies. Thisis partly because the sector is so new and so international,with its resources being directed towards particular disasterresponses.It is perhaps worth noting that there are a growing number ofdegree courses that teach engineering for disaster relief, whichis an important indicator of a maturing sector and of thedemand from engineering students to prepare appropriatelyfor getting involved. There are more conferences on disasterissues within the engineering community as well. 121There has been a massive growth in recent years in the militarycontracting engineering companies to provide relief anddeliver development projects. The wars in Afghanistan andIraq, and the conflict that followed them, appear to many inthe humanitarian sector to have produced a new militaryindustrialparadigm. Whilst this has had significant achievements– with new and re-built water supplies, electricity grids,hospitals, oil refineries, roads and other vital infrastructure – ithas given rise to deep concerns over disaster capitalism 122 andover the public understanding of humanitarianism. It is certainlyrecognized that the capabilities of engineering firms todeliver large-scale reconstruction and development projectsare far greater than those of humanitarian organizations, butcases have come to light regarding the way in which contractsare awarded or staff and stakeholders are treated that call intoquestion the true motivation for such projects. In turn, thishas meant that humanitarian agencies are, at the very least,hesitant to engage with the private sector in their disasterrelief work. It is a serious challenge to the engineering community,particularly given the potential positive impact thatengineering companies could bring (as demonstrated by successfulreconstruction projects awarded to major engineeringconsultancies after the Indian Ocean Tsunami to help restore120 Examples include the Red Cross Code of Conduct, the Humanitarian AccountabilityPartnership, the Good Enough Guide, accredited RedR training courses, the Clustersystem, and the SPHERE guidelines.121 Examples include ‘Civil Engineering Disaster Mitigation Conference: Earthquake andTsunami’ in June 2009, Istanbul (organized jointly by the World Council of Civil Engineers,the European Council of Civil Engineers and the Turkish Chamber of Civil Engineers)or ‘Engineering a Better World: Relief Operations and Construction’ in March2010 in London (organized jointly by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the CommonwealthEngineers Council).122 See the proceedings of RedR UK’s 2009 Conference ‘Hard Realities and Future Necessities:The Role of the Private Sector in Humanitarian Efforts’ and ‘The Shock Doctrine’by Naomi Klein.276