Tag / Engineers without Borders

by shannonchance

Global Responsibility of Engineering Report

Last week, Engineers Without Borders UK published my team’s research in the form of the GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY OF ENGINEERING REPORT. The EWB-UK webpage about the report explains “Drawing on the experience of engineers working in the built environment sector, our latest report explores the extent to which global responsibility is embedded in engineering practice.”

The report is rich visually, and also in content:

The qualitative research reported in this publication was conducted by me, with support from my University College London colleagues, Dr. Inês Direito and Professor John Mitchell, and with advice from the EWB staff and its project Advisory Board.

As described in the report:

Through a study of existing literature and interviews with engineers working in the built environment sector, in this report, we highlight the existing understanding and role of global responsibility as a concept within the sector. We explore the following: What is understood by global responsibility in engineering, and what are some of the preceding concepts that have led to this point? How well is the urgency for adopting a globally responsible approach in engineering grasped? To what extent do engineers feel it is their responsibility to take action and what is accelerating or dampening that?


Engineers Without Borders UK (2022)

EWB staff members helped transform my team’s research into the report format commonly used in the UK. They also provided the report’s case studies, photographs, and illustrations. EWB staff who were instrumental in shaping the delivery were: Dr. Jonathan Truslove, Katie Cresswell-Maynard, and Emma Crichton.

Advisory Board members providing conceptual direction included: Jon Prichard, Dr. Rob Lawlor, Thomas Gunter, Professor Nick Tyler, Dr. Rhys Morgan, and the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Education and Skills Committee.

The correct citation for this publication, based on APA guidelines includes the authors’ names:

Truslove, J., Chance, S. Cresswell-Maynard, K., Crichton, E., Direito, I., & Mitchell, J. (2022). Global Responsibility of Engineering Report. Engineers without Borders UK: London. https://www.ewb-uk.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/GRE-Report.pdf

I’d like to give special thanks to my colleagues at UCL (Inês, John and Nick) as well as the University of Leed’s Dr. Rob Lawlor for their encouragement and support throughout this project. I also send thanks to the EWB team for getting the publication across the finish line.

As a result of many people’s hard work, the report delivers our research findings to a new audience. You can find other outputs of the research project in two academic journal articles published by the UCL team, and you can download them directly, using the links below:

Above and beyond: ethics and responsibility in civil engineering

Opportunities and barriers faced by early-career civil engineers enacting global responsibility

by shannonchance

Above and Beyond: Ethics and Responsibility in Civil Engineering

A recent cover from the Australasian Journal of Engineering Education.

It’s been a long time coming, but a study I’ve been working on since the fall of 2018 has finally resulted in a publication–the first of several, I hope!

The article “Above and Beyond: Ethics and Responsibility in Civil Engineering” was released digitally this week, by the Australasian Journal of Engineering Education.

The publication process is often slow and suspense-ridden. I submitted the first draft of this paper at the start of March 2020, and now, just 15.75 months later, we’re nearly in print! The first step is digital release, and paper copies will come later.

Chance, S., R. Lawlor, I. Direito, and J. Mitchell. 2021. “Above and Beyond: Ethics and Responsibility in Civil Engineering.” Australasian Journal of Engineering Education. [Taylor & Francis Online]

University College London paid the Open Access publication free, so that you can download and read this article for FREE, without any special library access. My co-authors and I started this project at the request of Engineers without Borders UK, as the organization’s CEO, Katie Cresswell-Maynard, wanted to assess engineers’ perceptions and experiences related to “global responsibility”.

We prepared this specific report in response to a call for papers on ethics in engineering education and practice. To support the study of ethics, extracted data from our interviews that had to do with the topic, and studied it for patterns. As such, we’ve called this an exploratory study, on a topic where little prior research has been done.

Here’s the abstract:

This exploratory study investigates how nine London-based civil engineers have enacted ‘global responsibility’ and how their efforts involve ethics and professionalism. The study assesses moral philosophies related to ethics, as well as professional engineering bodies’ visions, accreditation standards, and requirements for continuing professional development. Regarding ethics, the study questions where the line falls between what an engineer ‘must do’ and what ‘would be good to do’. Although the term ethics did not spring to mind when participants were asked about making decisions related to global responsibility, participants’ concern for protecting the environment and making life better for people did, nonetheless, demonstrate clear ethical concern. Participants found means and mandates for protecting the health and safety of construction workers to be clearer than those for protecting society and the natural environment. Specific paths for reporting observed ethical infringements were not always clear. As such, analyses suggest that today’s shared sense of professional duty and obligation may be too limited to achieve goals set by engineering professional bodies and the United Nations. Moreover, although professional and educational accreditation standards have traditionally embedded ethics within sustainability, interviews indicate sustainability is a construct embedded within ethics.  

I want to wholeheartedly thank the research participants and the co-authors who stuck by my side and helped see this project to fruition. It was great to have an ethicist on board in authoring this paper, Dr. Rob Lawlor. It has been a joy to work with him, and with Dr. Inês Direito and Professor John Mitchell, throughout this project. We also enjoyed a helpful and astute advisory panel comprised of Professor Nick Tyler, Jon Pritchard, Dr. Rob Lawlor, and Katie Cresswell-Maynard. The study was supported financially by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions fellowship from the European Union (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016, Project 747069, DesignEng), with additional support provided to Engineers without Borders UK by the Royal Academy of Engineers.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading the article and will find it helpful.