Engineering in solidarity: Hybridizing knowledge systems in humanitarian and international development work

Engineers have a unique and powerful role to play in solidarity with communities engaged in environment and resource related struggles. By translating between technocratic-bureaucratic and local-traditional knowledge systems, engineers can mobilize their instrumental-technical expertise to affect moral-political change. Two possible approaches for this include: i) developing technical tools to affect institutional accountability; and ii) mobilizing and translating local-traditional knowledge to hybridize with technocratic-bureaucratic knowledge in a creative process leading to better development alternatives. This vision of development/humanitarian engineering builds on existing currents in the discourse and, in particular, contributes a vision of how institutional failures that prevent the delivery of public goods can be overcome by making institutions more responsive to community needs and perspectives. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.