TY - CONF
T1 - Understanding and incorporating stakeholder perspectives in international engineering
T2 - 2019 ASABE Annual International Meeting
AU - Schreiber, Kelsey L.
AU - Rodríguez, Luis F.
AU - Witmer, Ann Perry
AU - Dill, Brian
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful for funding from the USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Grant No. 2016-68004-24769. We would also like to thank the Biological Modeling Analysis and System Simulation (BioMASS) and Contextual Engineering lab groups at the University of Illinois for many thoughtful discussions and suggestions regarding this work. A special thanks to Sinead Soltis and Yixiao Liu for aiding in the scraping and preprocessing of all our data.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 ASABE Annual International Meeting. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - As water becomes increasingly scarce, it becomes more important to ensure its reliable access, especially in rural areas dependent on agriculture for both national food security and personal livelihoods. Too often the aid that is funneled to support these rural regions results in poor project sustainability and resiliency. With a variety of major actors in these project implementations, the actual definition of an achievable and successful project remains elusive. This research seeks to better understand how projects are evaluated from the perspectives of four main stakeholders: engineer, funder, government, and international NGO. We have used text mining analysis on a novel Stakeholder Evaluation Database (SED) to find representative phrases for each of the main stakeholders. Using cosine similarity, we compare top phrases across stakeholders and find evidence of differing priorities. While most stakeholder comparisons showed convergence, funders and international NGOs remain relatively dissimilar, a surprising result from stakeholders that often must interact closely throughout the project process. We also find a lack of available information on the opinions of the recipients of projects. This process is a first step in recognizing the differing priorities of stakeholders. Further refinement of the method seeks to include the recipient community perspectives, giving a voice to those most dependent upon and vulnerable to the success or failure of international engineering.
AB - As water becomes increasingly scarce, it becomes more important to ensure its reliable access, especially in rural areas dependent on agriculture for both national food security and personal livelihoods. Too often the aid that is funneled to support these rural regions results in poor project sustainability and resiliency. With a variety of major actors in these project implementations, the actual definition of an achievable and successful project remains elusive. This research seeks to better understand how projects are evaluated from the perspectives of four main stakeholders: engineer, funder, government, and international NGO. We have used text mining analysis on a novel Stakeholder Evaluation Database (SED) to find representative phrases for each of the main stakeholders. Using cosine similarity, we compare top phrases across stakeholders and find evidence of differing priorities. While most stakeholder comparisons showed convergence, funders and international NGOs remain relatively dissimilar, a surprising result from stakeholders that often must interact closely throughout the project process. We also find a lack of available information on the opinions of the recipients of projects. This process is a first step in recognizing the differing priorities of stakeholders. Further refinement of the method seeks to include the recipient community perspectives, giving a voice to those most dependent upon and vulnerable to the success or failure of international engineering.
KW - Big data
KW - Contextual engineering
KW - International development
KW - Phrase mining
KW - Project evaluation
KW - Rural water
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85084012606&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85084012606&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.13031/aim.201901425
DO - 10.13031/aim.201901425
M3 - Paper
AN - SCOPUS:85084012606
Y2 - 7 July 2019 through 10 July 2019
ER -