Post by Olivia Harris on Mar 6, 2017 17:06:30 GMT
The Hierarchy of Needs
The engineering face of international development involves interventions, like cleaning up cooking or drinking water sources. Is it ethical to impose a solution to a need when the recipient does not assign the same value to that need, because they have more immediate, pressing needs? For example, is it appropriate to give a clean cookstove to someone who is exposed daily to harmful combustion emissions, but worries more about where food is coming from that day? On the other hand, people meeting subsistence needs are unlikely to recognize threats to their health or well-being that occur much later. How do we respectfully walk the line between assisting people in avoiding major risks and acknowledging their urgent priorities?
How you can engage on this board:
The engineering face of international development involves interventions, like cleaning up cooking or drinking water sources. Is it ethical to impose a solution to a need when the recipient does not assign the same value to that need, because they have more immediate, pressing needs? For example, is it appropriate to give a clean cookstove to someone who is exposed daily to harmful combustion emissions, but worries more about where food is coming from that day? On the other hand, people meeting subsistence needs are unlikely to recognize threats to their health or well-being that occur much later. How do we respectfully walk the line between assisting people in avoiding major risks and acknowledging their urgent priorities?
How you can engage on this board:
- Share a struggle. When and how have you wrestled with this topic in your area of research? Give a concrete example of a project (details removed), if possible.
- Share a strategy. How do you as a provider decide what is a reasonable limit for imposing an improvement? How do you decide what counts as improvement?
What steps, tactics, precautions, and processes do you use to discern the needs of a community?
- Offer insight. What do you do when you discover a need you are not able to address? Does your answer change based on whether your research project is impacted or not?
- Hypothetically take on a problem. Pose a creative solution (from experience or imagination) to simultaneously satisfy a recipient’s need as well as a research-perceived need. What steps did you mentally take to create that solution?