Nothing Normal About The New World: A Vision For Post-Covid Development Engineering

COVID-19 has exposed many fault lines in development engineering. As international staff were repatriated, the need to support communities with basics such as sanitation and hygiene once again fell to local organisations, who are often underfunded, in part because of the international development funding structures that are stacked against them. We argue that this leads to tokenistic partnerships, intervention design driven by short-term trends rather than the needs of communities, and ecological damage to the detriment of the very communities we claim to support. We argue that international development must take this opportunity to become more cognisant of and accountable for our carbon footprint, to develop new ways to work with and support those organisations most closely linked to the communities they serve, to engage with the wider politics that has brought us to this point, and to commit to a socially just future that redresses the inequalities of the past.