The future of development engineering: Our vision for the next generation of publications in DevEng

Engineering plays an important role in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It contributes to a wide range of innovations, from the development of vital technologies such as solar water treatment systems (Mac Mahon and Gill, 2018a) or cookstoves (Wilson et al., 2018a), and new tools to assess progress towards the SDGs (Kipf et al., 2016a), to innovations in the design of decision-making environments and systems-level thinking on how development is achieved. Many researchers, aid agencies, and NGOs are currently involved in designing, implementing and evaluating engineering-based innovations, taking promising technologies and policies from controlled laboratory environments to the field. Along the way, they gain tremendous insights into the innovation process. However, these insights are often left in the realm of best practices, published in domain-specific journals that are not accessible to the development community, or disappear in appendices of manuscripts that are published years after the innovation was tested or prototyped. As a result, subsequent teams often do not build upon the lessons learned by other teams, and are left to develop their own innovation processes. Moreover, these processes often fail due to technologies not being vetted well enough, field tests not being comprehensive, and evaluations lacking rigour. Unfortunately, the most vulnerable pay the price when we so often produce ineffective solutions to poverty, and when we cannot produce new solutions without re-inventing the wheel.