Jessica Kaminsky

The Internal Social Sustainability of Sanitation Infrastructure

While the construction of sanitation infrastructure is one of humankinds greatest public health and environmental engineering achievements, its benefits are not yet enjoyed by all. In addition to the billions of people not yet reached by sanitation infrastructure, at least half of systems constructed in developing contexts are abandoned in the years following initial construction. In this research, we target the problem of postconstruction onsite sanitation infrastructure abandonment in rural Guatemala using legitimacy and status theory. Legitimacy and status are established theoretical concepts from organizational theory that reflect cultural alignment and normative support. Crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA), which uses Boolean algebra to discover combinations of theoretical conditions that produce an outcome of interest, allowed us to describe the various pathways that have caused socially sustainable uptake. We find that three combinations of legitimacy and status theory explain 85% of household cases at a consistency of 0.97. The most practically useful pathway covers 50% of household cases and shows that the combination of consequential legitimacy (a moral understanding of outcomes) and comprehensibility legitimacy (a cognitive model connecting outcomes to processes) is a powerful way to achieve socially sustainable sanitation infrastructure.

Cultured Construction: Global Evidence of the Impact of National Values on Sanitation Infrastructure Choice

Case study research often claims culture-variously defined-impacts infrastructure development. I test this claim using Hofstedes cultural dimensions and newly available data representing change in national coverage of sewer connections, sewerage treatment, and onsite sanitation between 1990 and 2010 for 21 developing nations. The results show that the cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance, masculinity-femininity, and individualism-collectivism have statistically significant relationships to sanitation technology choice. These data prove the global impact of culture on infrastructure choice, and reemphasize that local cultural preferences must be considered when constructing sanitation infrastructure.

Cultured Construction: Global Evidence of the Impact of National Values on Piped-to-Premises Water Infrastructure Development

In 2016, the global community undertook the Sustainable Development Goals. One of these goals seeks to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all people by the year 2030. In support of this undertaking, this paper seeks to discover the cultural work done by piped water infrastructure across 33 nations with developed and developing economies that have experienced change in the percentage of population served by piped-to-premises water infrastructure at the national level of analysis. To do so, I regressed the 1990-2012 change in piped-to-premises water infrastructure coverage against Hofstedes cultural dimensions, controlling for per capita GDP, the 1990 baseline level of coverage, percent urban population, overall 1990-2012 change in improved sanitation (all technologies), and per capita freshwater resources. Separate analyses were carried out for the urban, rural, and aggregate national contexts. Hofstedes dimensions provide a measure of cross-cultural difference; high or low scores are not in any way intended to represent better or worse but rather serve as a quantitative way to compare aggregate preferences for ways of being and doing. High scores in the cultural dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism-Collectivism, and Uncertainty Avoidance explain increased access to piped-to-premises water infrastructure in the rural context. Higher Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance scores are also statistically significant for increased coverage in the urban and national aggregate contexts. These results indicate that, as presently conceived, piped-to-premises water infrastructure fits best with spatial contexts that prefer hierarchy and centralized control. Furthermore, water infrastructure is understood to reduce uncertainty regarding the provision of individually valued benefits. The results of this analysis identify global trends that enable engineers and policy makers to design and manage more culturally appropriate and socially sustainable water infrastructure by better fitting technologies to user preferences.

Safety Communication Networks: Females in Small Work Crews

AbstractConstruction workers experience one of the highest workplace injury and fatality rates in the United States. Recent research has shown that worker demographics such as language affect safet...

Cultured Construction: Global Evidence of the Impact of National Values on Renewable Electricity Infrastructure Choice

Renewable electricity is an important tool in the fight against climate change, but globally these technologies are still in the early stages of diffusion. To contribute to our understanding of the factors driving this diffusion, I study relationships between national values (measured by Hofstedes cultural dimensions) and renewable electricity adoption at the national level. Existing data for 66 nations (representing an equal number of developed and developing economies) are used to fuel the analysis. Somewhat dependent on limited available data on controls for grid reliability and the cost of electricity, I discover that three of Hofstedes dimensions (high uncertainty avoidance, low masculinity-femininity, and high individualism-collectivism) have significant exponential relationships with renewable electricity adoption. The dimension of uncertainty avoidance appears particularly appropriate for practical application. Projects or organizations implementing renewable electricity policy, designs, or construction should particularly attend to this cultural dimension. In particular, as the data imply that renewable technologies are being used to manage risk in electricity supply, geographies with unreliable grids are particularly likely to be open to renewable electricity technologies.

Culturally appropriate organization of water and sewerage projects built through public private partnerships

This paper contributes to the pursuit of socially sustainable water and sanitation infrastructure for all people by discovering statistically robust relationships between Hofstede’s dimensions of cross-cultural comparison and the choice of contract award types, project type, and primary revenue sources. This analysis, which represents 973 projects distributed across 24 low- and middle-income nations, uses a World Bank dataset describing high capital cost water and sewerage projects funded through private investment. The results show that cultural dimensions explain variation in the choice of contract award types, project type, and primary revenue sources. These results provide empirical evidence that strategies for water and sewerage project organization are not culturally neutral. The data show, for example, that highly individualistic contexts are more likely to select competitive contract award types and to depend on user fees to provide the primary project revenue stream post-construction. By selecting more locally appropriate ways to organize projects, project stakeholders will be better able to pursue the construction of socially sustainable water and sewerage infrastructure.

Building Water and Wastewater System Resilience to Disaster Migration: Utility Perspectives

AbstractThis paper leverages expert knowledge from leaders in water and wastewater utilities to anticipate water and wastewater infrastructure impacts in communities that host populations displaced...

Construction Engineering Conference and Workshop 2014: Setting an Industry–Academic Collaborative Research Agenda

AbstractConstruction engineering is a vital discipline in industry practice, providing essential facilities and systems for modern society. Despite its undisputed importance, basic research intensity and focus has been declining, which is compounded by challenges in collaboration between industry and academia. This study therefore aimed to revitalize construction engineering by emphasizing basic research, exploring barriers and enablers, and collaboratively establishing an ambitious research agenda. These objectives were addressed via a dedicated research conference and workshop held in March 2014 in Seattle. The event outcomes included new collaborations for 49% of workshop participants. In addition, the workshop identified four fundamental attributes of basic construction engineering research, including the drive to further knowledge, to improve construction delivery, to serve industry, and to pursue sustainability. Ultimately, this paper presents a research agenda for construction engineering based on ...

The fourth pillar of infrastructure sustainability: tailoring civil infrastructure to social context

This research proposes technical performance over time as a fourth pillar of sustainability theory for infrastructure. It also describes a method that allows us to discover how changes in the technical pillar (operationalized as reduced breakage rates) may moderate the influence of the social pillar (operationalized as repair rates) on sanitation infrastructure outcomes. Oral histories were used to develop a history of sanitation for each of 152 poor households in four rural communities in Bangladesh that have gained access to sanitation in the past decade. Transcriptions and qualitative coding identified reported states of sanitation (for example, broken vs. functional) at three time steps. These were used to develop an initial vector and transition matrix for a Markov chain analysis. The breakage rate in this model was then adjusted to investigate the impact of improved technical durability on sanitation outcomes. For the case analysed here, we found that increasing infrastructure durability by 50% (an estimated increase of two years) increased the rate of functional sanitation system use at model convergence from 54% to 88%. Increases in durability also caused households to use private rather than shared systems. Beyond this specific case, the generalizable theory and method presented here are analytic tools that permit targeted technical accommodation of social contexts specific to individual project sites.

Institutionalizing infrastructure: photo-elicitation of cultural-cognitive knowledge of development

Infrastructure that goes unused – for example, after constructing the first water, electricity, sewers or road infrastructure in an infrastructure-poor community – is a common issue in new infrastructure development in the global south. In this case, while infrastructure has diffused, it has not become institutionalized. To better understand this problem, photo-elicitation methods are used to explore cultural-cognitive frames used by research respondents as they create and explain photograph symbols that represent change in their built environment. For example, respondents advocate for infrastructure they have reason to believe outsiders will provide as they evaluate the infrastructure against local utility in an early phase of institutionalization. Respondents also frame the research undertaking as an opportunity to actively diffuse infrastructure practices they have recently adopted themselves. By making these and other frames explicit, the photo-elicitation method reveals the elusive cultural-cognitive pillar of institutionalization and also provides insight into sources of self-reporting bias. The method also has particular advantages for research dealing with disadvantaged respondents, reduces issues of free recall bias and increases the length and depth of research interviews. Given the relative novelty of this method in construction research, its theory, advantages and limitations are discussed in some depth.