Engineering and humanitarian intervention: learning from failure

Abstract

In this paper, we challenge the belief that failure is necessarily a bad outcome. Instead, we argue that failure—specifically articulated as productive failure—should rather be seen as an educational moment and learning opportunity. Furthermore, we examine the field of humanitarian engineering to argue that the failures of various humanitarian engineering interventions are not necessarily because of flaws in the design process but due to the dominance of the mainstream development discourse, which obscures the importance of local contexts, knowledge, and wisdom. We ground the discussion in the broader context of contemporary development discourses and examine some examples of the failure of engineering and humanitarian assistance/development projects that can be converted into “productive failures” and used as learning opportunities.