The reality of community engagement in humanitarian engineering projects: Contextualizing the problem definition phase through the lens of community organizing

Centering a community's objectives within engineering decision-making is crucial in the development of robust and sustainable infrastructure, as it fosters a greater sense of autonomy for a community to maintain new technology over time. These considerations are not widely understood within engineering practice, resulting in a variety of approaches towards community engagement, many of which lack the processes to effectively integrate community considerations back into technical design. This paper contrasts the common approach to humanitarian engineering projects with an emerging paradigm called contextual engineering, which is validated through a cross-disciplinary investigation of community organizing projects regarding community engagement and decision-making. Case study investigation illustrated that project milestones in community organizing and contextual engineering cannot be achieved without heavy participation and genuine contribution from the client community stakeholders. However, in the humanitarian engineering approach, actions to engage the community were peripheral to the sequence of steps and not a requirement for proceeding. There still lacks a widespread common process for synthesizing qualitative data with technical decision-making – one that can mold to the unique conditions of different communities without becoming a rigid step-by-step plan. Contextual engineering recognizes this, but an approach has yet to be broadly defined and adopted.